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Vol. XIV-No.3
APRIL,1941 VOX
NOEL COWARD, THE DRAMATIST
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CLASS REPRESENTATIVES
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FJditol': ALBERT M. BRIGGS, '36.
CONTENTS
ARTICLES
Page
EDITORIAL ·__.__ _.."._._ L ,:: ~'. : : DONALDA McDONALD .__ _. 2
A GRAND DUEL._ c _ , .. _ __ ..DOUGLASS TUNSTELL __ "'.'_.. 23
EUTERPE AMERICA . :. ; ALBERTA SHEARER :.:.... 13
FROM MUNICH TO SOFIA __._ ;..__ __ H. G. SKILLING .. . __16
MISCHA ELMAN ...__.....__. :_.__ __..__..ENID VIVIAN NEMY ._............ 31
NOEL COWARD, THE DRAMATIST ~ __ K. W. McGIRR . _. 4
TOMORROW BEGINS TODAY ._ __ __ A. V. PIGOTT __ _ _.. 3
SHORT STORIES
OH CANADA __ ~ _ MARGARET BARAGER ::.._ 28
THE LETTER .__.;.:.;..: :_:.:: ..".:.'.•....:.L:. MARJORIE PECK ~ : __ 21
POETRY
ALLEGORY _c __ : ANNE PHELPS __., ,.. 9
PERHAPS' . .__ .__ ce.• :_.,..: } '.
~O%~~~~~~..~~.~..~_~~~~::::::::::::~::::::::: DONNA McRAE . _ 24-30
ALUMNI NOTES ----.. ··..··_···..-.._·..:..···..{.7:~~...:~-.~,;:~':1:'---··-..::.-·_··_······~-t~ ..·• _· ··~~·_...·~.._.;,··.._-r:··..~''..···_···· ..- __ • 24
1
EDITORIAL By Donalda B. McDonald
Slamming the "Stage Door" Slamming ENERGY is the most precious possession of a student. He translates this
energy into activity; but, quite frequently, that activity is like a ride on
the merry-go-round. The student may get a brass ring with a buffalo
on it; but, more often, he gets off feeling dizzy, ending his year "not with a
bang but a whimper."
I blame the student himself for this stupid state of affairs. Too many of us
are too ready to leap on one of the wooden horses with glittering brass poles
without considering whether it is worthwhile wasting our energy in the leap
and the subsequent hanging on.
The curriculum of a general arts course, in particular, is not a treadmill.
The time-table of twenty hours per week in junior division and sixteen hours
per week in senior division of formal lectures is a very mild attendance
requirement. If we assume that every student stays "awake," or at least out of
bed, for sixteen hours per day, that means that he has about eight hours of
time exclusive of formal classes and meals in which he is a free lance artist,
If we deduct another four hours per day for intensive individual "study," he
still has four hours for that particular brand of "living" which most students
consider is the prime object in coming to college. And so it is. But when I
think that those four hours of "living" have a peculiar habit of stretching
through the whole day, I sometimes wonder why we choose to expend our
precious energy in that stretching.
What do we do? Oh, yes--extra curricular activities. The student news­paper,
magazine, Glee Club, Debating Club, athletics are the finest occupations
in the world for that precious four hours of "living," provided that these
organizations are living' up to their names. We are blessed with a Public
Relations Committee who sees to it that this is the case as far as the public is
concerned.
But, after the public has been taken care of, there is no one to protect the
student from himself. Professors are very tactful in student activities; but
quite often students are a little too spirited to get the point in that tact. In that
spiritedness the student rushes into something without considering the end.
MY PARTICULAR point of attack is on the major productions of the
1 Dramatic Society of our University for the last four years, as these are
the best known to me. We have just as fine a crop of amateur talent as any
other Canadian University-actors, stage crews, wardrobe mistresses, make-up
experts. We have members· of the faculties who are specialists in any aspect
of drama from a voice inflection to the careful draping of a set of curtains.
In such informal affairs as the annual One-Act Play Festival the work of
these people, both students, professors and professional guides, shines. But, in
the major productions of the year, a full length play, all this fine effort is
"wasted on second-rate material, /especially this year's offering.
I realize how much work went into that little opus. But I contend that it
was one of the finest displays of wasted effort it has ever been my privilege
to try to applaud, if not for the achievement, at least for the effort. .
(Continued on Page 29)
TOMORROW
begins
TODAY
By A. V. PIGOTT '20 By A. V. PIG 0 T T '2 0
r-"f~"'3WENTY-THREE centuries ago Plato
said, "Most of the social and political
Le:~~ ills from which you suffer are under
your control, given only the will and courage
to change them. You can live in another and a
wiser fashion if you choose to think it out and
work for it."
Today in our chaotic world I think we still
believe our old Greek mentor. But we are too
busy exculpating ourselves and blaming others,
both in times of peace and war, to get 'down to
business and avoid the pitfalls ahead.
How much we have said and written al­ready
about the cause of the present war! It
comes from personal ambitions, personal wick­edness,
personal greed in the people of the
world. "Ah!" says the socialist, "those are at-
. tributes of the capitalist."
The French show the bloodthirsty German's
place in starting many recent wars; the Ger­mans
point with passion to the aggressive Eng­lish.
We shall blame Hitler, and he, in turn,
will hurl invective at the head of the im­perturbable
Churchill.
Back of all the clamour, however, lie the
real causes of our ills-Science and Invention.
These masters of our Age have created a new
world of steel and iron, of physics and chemis­try;
They have amplified our power, increased
our knowledge, and have given us more free­dom
from toil and drudgery than any genera­tion
the world has seen. But they were given
to us by a few minds--a few courageous lead­ers
who paid no attention to the fact that the
human mind is very slow and'extremely lazy.
It has always dragged a century or so behind
clinging to the tail of progress and hollering,
"Whoa!" Mr. Nobody uses all these modern
gadgets for living, handles dangerous machines,
controls great) powers, but philosophically and
3
A. V. PIGOTT
socially he is at home only with the thoughts
of the sixteenth century.
It is always so. Old moral and political
codes hold us long after the world for which
they were made have passed on. It was so dur­ing
the Middle Ages. Men went forward for
centuries while gazing lovingly. backward to
the Golden Age of Rome. Surely the good old
days would come again. Perhaps a Holy Roman
Empire could do the trick. But it didn't. New
leaders arose and created the good new days of
the Renascence and once again mankind faced
the future for a while.
A century from now historians will prob­ably
amuse the people of that day with the
amazing story of our frightful nationalistic
struggles, while, in the laboratories of the
world, great secrets of power were being
wrested from nature. Secrets that had in them
all the potentialities of a brave new world.
They will tell how, in one generation of
time and space, new products, factories, raw
materials and their markets knit the world into
a great international business complex. The
Democracies were the leaders in this and their
success was built on freedom and industry.
Peace became a necessity and war an ana­chronism.
OTHER states did not fare so well. To hold
up their structure, discipline and arma­ment
worked best. Peace was dangerous; race
hatred and war seemed to be necessary.
In the Democracies freedom had run roit;
and business led to an insidious stratification of
(Continued on Page 26)
Clr""_!llI!'IRIVATE LIVES," the best comedy
written by Noel Coward, marks simul­taneously
the climax and crisis of his
career up until now. It is the climax because it
brings to perfection the type of comedy which
he writes so well and it is the crisis because it
shows that he has achieved great heights in
this type of comedy, but if he is to progress and
be ranked among the world's foremost dramat­ists
he must inculcate into his style- and situa­tions
something of a broader}~ and richer
character.
The scene for "Private Lives" is laid in a
fashionable and expensive hotel. The people
are smooth and sophisticated, giving a brief
glimpse of the kind of top hat and sequin so­ciety
which dangles a cocktail glass in one hand
and divorce in the other-the kind of people
and society with which Noel Coward is in­variably
associated. The sleek, blase, sophisti­cation,
portrayed in lightning-paced, hard, rat­tling,.
farcial comedy situations and lives at
which he aimed so many trial shots is brought
to perfection here. Fleeting glimpses of it are
in his earlier plays-in the first two acts of
"The Vortex," and scattered here and there
throughout "Hay Fever"-but "Private Lives"
constitutes a resume of all his former attempts
and brings his efforts at this type of comedy to
a brilliant zenith.
"Private Lives" is the story of a husband
and wife, Elyot and Mandy, who have just
been divorced. The play opens with them both
embarking on a second honeymoon at the same
hotel, each ignorant of the presence of the
other. As their rooms open on to adjoining
balconies it is inevitable that they should meet,
which they do after being mutually irritated
by their new better halves. The result is that
they discover that they are still in love and
rush back to Paris-on the first night of their
second honeymoon and resume existence at
their old apartment, leaving their latest attach­ments
to find them as best they can.
As Elyot's and Amanda's divorce had been
brought about, not from lack of love, but be­cause
of their constant bickering, they make an
agreement to· shout "Solomon Isaacs" when­ever
they feel a quarrel coming on. This work­ed
very well for a while, but eventually they
end up in a beautiful brawl, rolling on the floor,
biting and kicking each other. In the midst of
4
NOEL COWARD NOEL THE DRA this quiet little interlude, who should walk in
but Sybil and Victor, the erstwhile honey­mooners.
Their conventional horror at the situation,
and their smugness at not being part of it, is
sublime. The conclusion of the play is even
merrier. In the general discussion which fol­lows
about what is to be done, Amanda and
Elyot gradually come together again while
Sybil and Victor, hitherto quite friendly in
their mutual loss, begin to find fault with each
other instead of with Amanda and Elyot as
formerly'. Consequently, the scene ends with
Amanda and Elyot slipping quietly off, hand in
hand, very much in love, while Sybil and Vic­tor
are in the midst of the same type of vulgar
brawl as that which they had previously
descried.
The play was hailed by the papers as ten­uous,
thin, brittle, gossamer, irridescent, and
delightfully daring, which added up in the
public mind to cocktails, evening dress, re­partee,
and a dash of wickedness, thus making
the play an immediate success from the box
office point of view.
It was written when Coward was in Shang­hai
recuperating from a bout of influenza which
had struck him on the trip he was taking to
recuperate from his strenuous work previously
-the failure of "Sirocco" and the success of
"Bittersweet."
Apparently when leaving on his trip he had
promised Gertrude. Lawrence that he would
write a play for her. The idea for "Private
Lives" struck him in Tokyo but he did not
write it at once. "Hay Fever," five years pre­viously,
had been written in three days, but
benefitting by experience he determined to
write "Private Lives" at his leisure. The op­portunity
came with Shanghai and influenza
and he completed a rough draft of the play,
which he polished up later in Hong Kong. Con­sidering
how, when and where it was written,
A.
I
1
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II
~BD
E Dramatist D
ten­and
the
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Con­itten,
By Kay W. McGirr
AMilTI·ST
I can only marvel that he did not bring in at
least a Chinese butler; however, no trace of the
Orient is discernible.
On the whole, the play was a great suc­cess.
'this was remarkable because it is ex­ceedingly
difficult to act. The brittle dialogue,
usually between two characters only, is difficult
to sustain despite its many laugh lines and
comic situations. These are packed through­out
the play and; are the best yet written by
Coward. Although the lines in his earlier plays
are witty and amusing, they lack the brilliant
force and subtlety displayed in situations such
as the following:
Elyot: If there's one thing in the world that in­furiates
me it is sheer wanton stubbornness. I
should like to cut your head off with a meat axe.
Sybil: How dare you talk to me like that on our
honeymoon nighti
Elyot: Damn our honeymoon night. Damn it,
damn it, damn it!
Sybil (bursting into tears): Oh, Elli, Elli-­Elyot:
Stop crying. Will you or will you not
~ come away with me to Paris?
Sybil: I've never been so miserable in my life.
You're hateful and beastly. Mother was perfectly
right. She said you had shifty eyes.
Elyot: Well, she can't talk. Her's are so close
together you couldn't put a needle between them.
The same humor occurs in the following
discussion between Amanda and Elyot in their
flat when they are hiding in Paris from their
new co-partners in Honeymoons a la Mode:
Elyot: I suppose one or other of them will turn
up here eventually.
Amanda: Bound to; it won't be very nice, will
it?
Elyot (cheerfully): Perfectly horrible.
Amanda: "Do you realize we're living in sin?
Elyot: Not according to the Catholics. Catholics
don't recognize divorce. We're married as much as
we ever were.
Amanda: Yes, dear, but we're not Catholics.
Elyot: Never mind, it's nice to think they sort of
back us up. We were married in the eyes of Heaven
and we still are.
5
Amanda: We may be all right in the eyes of
Heaven but we look like being in a hell of a mess
socially.
And a sure-fire laugh line occurs with Elyot
exclaiming prudishly in a fit of jealousy, "It
doesn't suit women to be promiscuous," while
Amanda retorts, "It doesn't suit men for women
to be promiscuous."
Slightly less subtle but equally effective is
the following passage beginning with Amanda
exclaiming loftily, "I've been brought up to
believe that it's beyond the pale for a man to
strike a woman."
Elyot: A very poor tradition. Certain women
should be struck regularly like gongs.
Amanda: You're an unmitigated cad and a bully.
Elyot: And you're an ill-mannered, bad-temp­ered
slattern.
Amanda (loudly): Slattern, indeed.
Elyot: Yes, slattern, slattern, slattern and fish­wife.
Victor: Keep your mouth shut, you swine.
Elyot: Mind your own damned business.
The method employed in this last passage
is the most common one in comedy, that of in­vective
and abuse. Nevertheless, these bits are
scattered among parts of a more subtle nature
so that the result is a brilliant and witty and
convicing comedy.
BUT despite these obvious devices there
seems to be an attempt by Coward at intri­cate
plot structure. Instead of having his plot
rising in jagged peaks to a climax, there is a
definite attempt at something more difficult in
the line of a figure resembling an hour glass.
Prior to the opening of the play, Elyot and
Amanda are each on the tip of the glass. When
the play opens we are plunged in media res,
into the midst of complications where they are
separated. This is the straight part of the.glass,
However, these complications gradually extend
out to where they were at the beginning, with
Amanda and Elyot once more reconciled and
on the extreme tip of the glass.
This same sort of arrangement manifests
itself perhaps more clearly, although inversely,
in a brief one-act play entitled, "We Were
Dancing." When the scene opens Louise and
Karl' are dancing. They are total strangers.
Suddenly a kind of enchantment sweeps over
them and they are madly in love. They tell
Hubert, Louise's husband, at once. He is very
understanding and sympathetic and stays with
them until dawn, threshing the whole situation
out. Then, when it is settled that Louise will
go off on a trip with Karl immediately he
leaves, Karl looks at Louise, takes her in his
arms, they dance and then Karl remarks, "Of
course, the music makes a difference," and
Louise, "Moonlight doesn't last." They kiss
each other, the magic is gone, and there is
nothing left.
In the beginning of the play, Louise and
Hubert are apparently happily married when
Karl enters the scene and he and Louise fall
so madly in love with each other. Then after
the ensuing complications the pattern is in its
original state with Louise back with Hubert.
Thus there seems to be a sort of deliberate
structure behind Coward's plays, no matter
how loosely they seem to be hung together on
the surface. He has an excellent, intuitive
sense of writing which is probably the result of
this wide and varied experiences with the
theatre. From his earliest years he was school­ed
in all the arts of the theatre, singing, danc­ing
and acting, so that it is no wonder that to­day
he is an actor, and dancer, an author of
plays, and lyrics, and a composer of music.
He first showed his inclinations along this
line at the age of four, when he was taken to
church and during the first hymn proceeded to
dance in the aisle. Upon being told that this
was not the thing to do, he sobbed violently :
and had to be taken home. Thus his first ap­pearance
in public was hardly what might be
called a success.
At six, however, he overcame this unfavor­able
beginning by being a tremendous success
at a children's concert where he sang and
accompanied himself on the piano.
At .seven he had progressed so far that he
had worked out a dance routine.
Two years later he wrote a tragedy and
forced the neighboring girls to act in it. When
they giggled and refused to treat his great work
with the high seriousness which he felt it de­served,
he bashed one of them over the head
with a wooden spade. This first play was - c
doomed to failure because the spade episode
apparently aroused international complications
in the form of a flock of angry mothers.
When he was ten the family fortunes reach­ed
a new state of collapse and his mother took
in roomers. His attendance at school had al-
6
ways been unwilling and poor and now it
practically ceased altogether. He was given a
chance to act in "The Great Name," with
Charles Hautry, and so became aprofessional
actor.
After this he was in a considerable number
of plays although not employed constantly.
Three years later, however, he was engaged
with the Liverpool Repertory Company, where
his life-long friendship with Gertrude Law­rence
began. He refers in "Present Indicative"
to her as "a viv.acious child with ringlets to
whom I took an instant fancy."
In 1918 his career as an actor was abruptly
curtailed for his brief and inglorious existence
in the British army. Owing to bad headaches,
brought on by an acute dislike of the Atrrny and
poor physical condition, he was soon sent to a
hospital where to his horror he was placed in
an epileptic ward. Eventually a doctor was
found who understood the nature of his dis­order
and he was placed under treatment,
cured, and discharged with a six months' pen­sion
to his infinite relief.
After this brief and loathsome interval, he
returned to his life as an actor and by the end
of the year had definitely established the
theatre as his world, having done considerable
acting, written several plays and in addition to
these composed some verse, lyrics, a novel and
short stories.
His verse and lyrics while reasonably good
and popular in demand have never achieved
the fame that his plays have. A few of them,
for example, "I'll See You Again" from "Bitter­sweet,"
are definitely catchy and have good
rhythm but lack that certain something neces­sary
for lasting quality. His best work has
undoubtedly been done in the field of drama
and it is in this sphere that his greatest chances
for future fame rest, and it is the purpose of
this article - to discuss mainly his merits as a
dramatist.
Although when he was twenty he succeeded
in selling a play for $2,000, it was never pro­duced,
and it was not until five years later
when "The Vortex" was produced that his first
smash hit occurred. The customary trials and
tribulations which invariably occur in the
production of a play seemed even morse than
usual in connection with "The Vortex." Every­thing
that could possibly happen in the way of
bad luck happened with a vengeful tury. De­spite
the bad omens, the play was a huge suc­cess.
Coward himself acted the heavy part of
Nicky, and although he no doubt turned in a
very creditable performance, the play itself re­ceivedmore
plaudits than his acting in it.
The plot of "The Vortex" deals with a beau­tiful
woman, Florence, who has had innumer­able
love affairs since her marriage, and her
son, Nicky, who becomes a drug addict.
The first act takes place in Florence's town
home where she is surrounded by noise, cock­tails,
gaiety and friends, chief of whom is Tom
Veryan, a dumb, handsome beast, and her lat­est
lover. Nicky, who has been studying
abroad, returns, bringing with him his fiancee,
Bunty Mainwaring, a blunt, normal sort of girl,
who it seems is an old friend of Tom's. At a
house party which Florence gives the next
week everyone's nerves become frayed and
Bunty and Tom decide they have more in
common with each other than with Florence
and Nicky, whereupon Bunty breaks her en­gagement.
Florence, upon catching Tom and
Bunty in a clinch, gives way to an uncontroll­able
emotion and Nicky for the first time sees
her as a she really is-a cheapened old woman.
A terrific scene then ensues between Florence
and Nicky in which Nicky forces a confession
from Florence that Tom has not been her first
lover and in turn discloses his drug habit. The
play ends with tears all over the place and
mother and son clasped in each other's arms.
The first two acts display Coward's mastery
of dialogue and ability to give a vivid sense of
bored, hectic society, both trends which later
reached their peak of perfection in "Private
Lives." The dialogue is sharp and scintillating,
abounding in humorous touches. However, the
tempo changes abruptly with the third act. The
play loses its air of detached, blase sophistica­tion
and suddenly becomes desperately sincere
and earnest. D~perately so, because Coward
loses llimself in it in his earnestness and the
result is that it is overdrawn and strained and
Nicky is unnaturally brutal to his mother when,
for instance, he exclaims during the tense in­timate
sc~ne in Florence's bedroom, "You're
not young or beautiful; I'm seeing for the first
time how old you are. It's horrible-your silly
fair hair - and your face all plastered and
painted--."
7
HOWEVER, despite its faults, the scene is
real and compelling, with vital moments
such as this one.
Despite Coward's youth when he wrote it,
the play shows a remarkable knowledge of
stage technique in the first two acts, where a
glimpse of his future greatness as a master of
dialogue is seen.' In the last act, too, may be
seen a certain potentiality, which when toned
down and ironed out, would reveal the author
not only a master of dialogue but of powerful
situations as well.
As it is, the play although good is too apt
to slip from the hands of the actors. An ex­ample
of this occurred in Chicago when Noel
Coward was making an American tour with the
play. Instead of pathos and tears at the end of
the play, something failed to click and the
audience was smitten with laughter at the be­ginning
of the third act until, at the end, people
were practically rolling in the aisles.
The characters are clear and well drawn
and on the whole the play, although not re­markable,
shows good entertainment value and
is a remarkable achievement when the youth
and experience of Coward at that time are
taken into consideration.
It is not a great play but is a series of short
sketches, perfect in themselves. One of these
occurs at the end of Act II, when you have the
son frantically playing the piano while the
mother cheapens herself and whimpers for her
lover. And'again in Act III the portion of the
play where the mother and son go to the win­dow
is a little entity in itself. Therefore, al­though
"The Vortex" is a weak play it is re­deemed
by its supple, idiomatic dialogue and
thumb-nail sketches set here and there and
beautifully achieved.
Another play written during this early
period of his life, and which he dashed off in
three days flat, is "Hay Fever." The characters
for this play were taken from life and varied
to suit his own purposes.
Apparently he stayed with a family of Scotts
while visiting G. B. Stern for a few weeks, and
they were utterly rude to him most of the
time. He describes Mrs. D. Scott in definite
and unflattering terms in "Present Indicative."
However, it is from this woman that the gay,
blithe, entrancing Judith Bliss of "Hay Fever"
is drawn. Before I go into raptures over Judith,
as I invariably will sooner or later, a brief
sketch of the plot is necessary.
The situation is a week-end party at Cook­ham
at the villa of Mr. and Mrs. Bliss and their
grown-up son and daughter, Simon and Sorel.
They have each, without telling anyone, asked
a guest for the week-end. Judith (Mrs. Bliss)
has asked Sandy Tynell, a strapping Greek
god, a bit on the dumb side but very hand­some.
Mr. Bliss, a second-rate novelist, has
invited Miss Jackie Coryton, a cheap flapper,
presumably to "study" her for his latest
creation, "The Sinful Woman." Simon Bliss,
the son, has asked Myra Arundel, a siren widow
to whom he has lightly taken a passionate
fancy. Sorel Bliss, in reaction to the Bohem­ianism
of her family, has told a diplomat, Rich­ard
Greatham, of mature years, to come for the
week-end.
Each member of the family neglects to tell
the others of his plans and emotional complica­tions
result. The villa is small (one guest has
the Japanese room, another Little Hell, and we
never do find out where the other two sleep),
one of the two servants is ill and provisions are
anything but plentiful. Each guest has been
given to understand that he is to be the only
one and each has looked forward to a little
private flirtation. The family add to the com­plications
by their incorrigible habit of drama­tizing
everything.
Judith, it seems, is an actress and though
she has retired innumerable times she inevit­ably
returns to the stage. But whether on it or
not, she acts all the time 'and the family feel
bound to play up to her. They are casual, care­less,
proud of themselves and each other, but
they ar.e always at their very best when with
Judith. Her vital enthusiasm and supreme
nonchalant, unknowing disregard for every­t.
hing and everybody sweeps up and carries
along the entire family. As a family they have
a marvellous time together as the following
scene shows, when Judith announces that she
intends to revive h~r famous play, "L~ve's
Whirlwind."
The mere suggestion of "Love's Whirlwind"
is enough to set the family Joff and they all drop
automatically into parts as Judith speaks the
opening line, "Is this a game?" Simon and
Sorel play up to her beautifully and for a few
moments we feel completely crazy with the
mad Bliss family. Later on "Love's Whirlwind"
8
really comes into its own at the end of Act II,
where one of the guests enters a room in the
house where everyone is assembled and un­suspectingly,
because of all the noise, asks what
is going on and says the fatal words, "Is this a
game?" to which Judith replies, "Yes, and a
game that must be played to the finish." Simon
grasps the situation immediately and cries,
"Zana, what does this mean7" At this point,
David Bliss, the father, realizes what is going
on and collapses on the sofa, muttering in a
hysterical aside, "Love's Whirlwind! Dear old
Love's Whirlwind." But Judith, Simon and
Sorel play out the scene to the end, while their
guests look on in dazed horror.
Situations like this one and the one which
concludes the play, where the family sit around
the breakfast table arguing over a trivial point
in the now completed "Sinful Woman," while
their guests slip quietly off, unnoticed and un­wanted,
make the playa' laughable riot from
start to finish.
Comic situations, excellent characterization
(Judith) and a natural, witty dialogue com­bine
to make "Hay Fever" one of the funniest
and most enjoyable plays I have ever read.
Following the success of "The Vortex" and
"Hay Fever," Coward suffered a series of fail­ures,
which was climaxed by "Sirrocco." And
so the first phase of his career, which had be­gun
with so much bright promise, closed in
doubt and despair.
However, no one as versatile as Coward
could remain under a cloud for long, and soon
he was back in public favor with "Bittersweet"
and "Cavalcade." Coward, himself, in speak­ing
of "Bittersweet," said that as a whole it
gave him more complete satisfaction than any­thing
else which he had written because it
achieved and sustained the original mood of
its conception more satisfactorily than a great
deal of his other works and partially because
its mood of semi-nostalgic seitiment appealed
to him.
I, myself, saw "Bittersweet" performed on
the-screen some eight-odd years ago. As at that
time I was in the throes of young love and con­sequently
more interested in the boyan my
right than the hero on the screen, all I can re­member
is that I was profoundly bored, im­patient,
and anxious to leave, incurring at that
time a violent dislike for Noel Coward. This
(Continued on Page 10) _
v Allegory 1llegory
1'1
--...----....: .-.-
9
By Ann Phelps diffusing
of gray­rang
already on
d to ring on dead
arms took
Noel Coward, Dramatist Noel Coward, Dramatist
(Continued from Page 8)
opinion did not change until.two years ago,
when it vanished like most of my previous
ideas.
My latest experience with the play, "Bitter­sweet,"
done up in typical Nelson Eddy and
Jeannette MacDonald style, was very lovely
and impressive, but not, definitely not, Noel
Coward's play.
I am not going to attempt to ruin "Bitter­sweet"
for anyone by giving one of my fascin­ating
little sketches of it. All I can say is that
there is an intangible something in it which
appeals profoundly to most of us and lingers
like the scent of pressed roses, the scent of
beautiful things, loved and gone.
My feelings toward "Cavalcade" are mixed.
On the one hand, as I dislike sagas intensely, I
want to condemn it as a superficially starring
production, actually not a good drama and
perhaps a little cheap in spirit with its "Rule
Britannia and "We-don't-want-to-fight-but-by­Jingo-
if-we-do" ideas. ON THE other hand, I cannot deny that there
is a certain richness and tenderness about
the scene on the Titanic when we are given a
glimpse of Edith and Edward, so full of life .
and looking forward to everything so much
and the supreme significance of the moment
when Edith removes her cloak from the rail
and discloses the· white life belt with S.S.
Titanic in black upon it.
Then again, apart from merely singing the
glories of the British Empire it does convey a
sense of a spectacle of a civilization that came
and went-the destroying of old values and
the gradual building of the new, in all their
vulgarity and crudity. This last is typified in
Ellen, the maid ,who had changed from a
quiet, respectful servant to a loud, "I'm just as
good as you" distinctly middle-class woman.
"Cavalcade" was a huge success and was
greeted enthusiastically by both England and
America. One of the most thrilling parts of
Coward's autobiography, "Present Indicative,"
is when he tells his thrill of seeing the Royal
Family at "Cavalcade."
After the brilliant success of both "Caval­cade"
and "Bittersweet," Noel Coward return­ed
once more to public gaze as a dramatist.
Benefiting from his failures in this line, he
tightened his plots and concentrated not only
10
on witty lines but on situations as well. "De­sign
for Living" and "Private Lives" resulted in
all their scintillating glory.
However, there is something more to
Coward than just brilliant musical productions
and comedies. There is another side of him
mainly shown in his plays, which have not
been quite so successful.
The idea of what is moral and what is not
seems to be constantly in his mind. Illicit love
affairs occur again and again as the theme of
his plays. He seems to be groping after a
standard of· values and like Aristotle seems
to think value a relative thing, i.e., right or
truth is not something fixed but is relative to
the situation to which it appertains. There­fore,
Linda, Leo and Otto, who live together
in such glorious unmarried bliss in "Design
for Living" should not be scorned as moral'
degenerates from our rigid moral standards
because actually they are virtuous when judg­ed
in connection with another set.
. Often, too, he shows that the infidelity of a
wife or husband is due to some unpredictable
event. If they fall in love it is not because they
want to but because some kind of spell has
been cast over them and they are swept away
before they can realize what is happening.
Sometimes they are freed from the trend by
supreme will power and at others they never
escape. In "The Astonished Heart," Chris
manages to free himself but he only does so by
death.
Barbara and Chris are stagnating in com­fortable
married life until suddenly Lenora
Vail, Barbara's old school chum, appears on
the scene. She is beautiful and starts a flirta­tion
with Chris to cure her insatiable appetite
for intrigue and romance. Unfortunately, she
tires of Chris before he does of her and in
bitter disillusionment at her fickleness he hurls
himself from a window. The play ends ironic­ally
with Chris dying in Lenora's arms crying,
"Babs, I'm not submerged any more, Babs."
In "We Were Dancing (the plot sketch was
given previously) the lovers were disillusioned
immediately and mutually and the tragedy lay
in the loss of the enchanting what might have
been.
In "The Astonished Heart" one member of
the intrigue tires before the other, with the
result that for a moment Chris is almost free
of the spell. He gropes desperately for the
answer ana In a final surge of despair at the
futility of it all, cries at Lenora, "It isn't your
fault. I don't believe it's even mine-it's an
act of God, darling, like fire and wind and
pestilence. You're in on a grand tragedy, the
best tragedy of all, and the best joke, the
triumphant, inevitable defeat of mind by mat­ter
. . . Get up and go-it doesn't matter any
more to me whether you're here or in the
moon. Get up and go-"
The disillusionment of Chris is complete.
The inevitability. of it all has burst upon him.
Naturally he jumps out a window and as he
dces so the last bonds break so that he is able
to escape and exclaim at last, "I'm not sub­merged
anymore."
"Still Life" is a further variation of this
conflict of a man and a woman with forces
which seem beyond their control. In this case
neither tires of the situation, but both are mar­ried
and have children, and because of this
agree to separate. The entire action takes place
in the refreshment room of a station where
they have their first accidental meeting. They
meet here weekly until they eventually fall in
love and become lovers, meeting secretly in
the house of a friend of Alec's. Unfortunately,
the friend returns unexpectedly one night and
although he probably doesn't know of Laura's
presence, nevertheless, she feels cheapened and
sees that the affair must end. She meets him
for the last time at the station. But they are
even cheated of a last farewell as a friend of
Laura's finds them and sticks like glue. Alec
is forced to say goodbye, casually, and leave-:­forever.
A few moments later an express is
due. Laura walks out to meet it. calmly, but
at the last minute her courage fails her and
she returns white and shaken.
IF THE aim of a tragedy is to produce cath-arsis
it certainly succeeds here. We pity
Laura-the cheapening discovery of what was
to her a magical moment, her return to a hum­drum
life and the way in which she was
thwarted of a last farewell, and the failure of
her courage when she was about to throw
herself beneath the express train. But we feel
fear too. A fear that there are these forces out­side
us, inevitable and ruthless, waiting silently
for a chance to pounce and destroy the puny
lives within their grasp.
It. is this problem, namely the fact that
people are so often caught up in an inevitable
trend of circumstances pre-arranged for them,
that seems to fascinate Coward. It reoccurs
again and again throughout his work, now in
one form, now in another. He turns it over and
over seeking a solution but never seems to
find one.
He attempts to define it in "We Were
Dancing," when Louise exclaims, "This thing
is here-now-between Karl and me. It's no
use pretending it isn't,or trying to flip it away
as a joke, nor is it any use taking up a belli­gerent
attitude over it. God knows I'm con-
. fused enough myself, utterly bewildered, but
I do know that it's real, too real to be dissi­pated
by conventional gestures." And then
Karl says, "I know that suddenly, when we
were dancing, an enchantment swept over me.
An enchantment that I have never known
before and shall never know again."
It appears again in "The Astonished Heart"
when Barbara, the wife, accepts her husband's.
confession, calmly saying, "You said just now
you were submerged-that's true you are;
you've crushed even your· emotions for years
and now you're paying for it. It's nothing to
be ashamed of, with your sort of temperament
it was inevitable. It had to happen. I've been
waiting for it."
And Chris, in torture, replies, "Suddenly
I felt myself being swept away and I started
to struggle, but the. tide was stronger than I
knew and now I'm far from the land, darling­far
from my life and you and safety-I'm
struggling still, but the water is terribly deep
and I'm frightened-I'm frightened. It isn't
Lenora, it's nothing to do with Lenora any
more; it's the thing itself-her face and her
body and her charm make a frame, but the
picture's in me, before my eyes constantly, and
I can't get it out.
It occurs again in "Point Valaine" when
Martin says, "I'm a little frightened. Perhaps
it is the strangeness of the thing that is scaring
us both, the suddenness of finding out how we
feel about each other. It's like sort of a dream
to me, it has been ever since I arrived."
In addition to this preoccupation with
values and toying with fate, a distinct satiric
trend is noticeable in Coward. He apparently
took a long time to recover from the bitter
disillusionment of the war. His earlier plays
take off beautifully the bright shallow crea­tures
who appeared after the war. An example
of this is in the first two acts of "The Vortex"
11
and also in "Hands Across the Sea," where the
people are only hollow shells.
One of the most significant speeches I ran
across in connection with this was that of Zoe
in "This Was a Man." She has been away and
on her return feels lost and out of touch. She
says in a fit of disillusionment:
"Futile! I return after a year's oblivion,
thrilled and excited, longing to see myoId
friends, and what do I find? Clacking, shallow,
nonentities, doing the same things; saying the
same things, thinking the same things. They're.
stale! They seem to have lost all wit and charm
and restraint-or perhaps they never had any."
His disgust with the times is further ex­pressed
by this speech, "I loathe this age and
everything to do with it. All the red-blooded,
honest-to-God emotions have been squeezed
out of us. We're incapable of hating enough
or loving enough. When any big moment comes
along, good or bad, we hedge around it, argu­ing
it, weighing it, in the balance of reason and
psychology, trying to readjust values until
there's nothing left and nothing achieved."
Like most men he cannot resist a dig or so
at women and has Quinn in "Point Valaine"
state, "I think I despise most their lack of emo­tional
balance," and later, "I also dislike their
fundamental dishonesty."
However, perhaps he pleads for our under­standing
in this next speech of Quinn's. "You
see, I always affect to despise human nature.
My role in life is so clearly marked cynical,
detached, unscrupulous, an ironic observer and
recorder of other people's passions. Perhaps
. I am misunderstood. Perhaps I have suffered
a great deal and am really a very loving spirit."
At any rate, whether he meant it or not,
there is a very definite cynical detachment
running throughout his plays. He shows up the
class consciousness and the artificiality of the
bourgeois morality, but there is something more
in it than this.
Although his people are set in this frame­work
of bourgeois morality; he is not always
sneering at their superficialness. Rather, it
seems to me in many of his plays that he
contrasts two sets of values. What Glenda,
Otto and Leo do is all right in their world of
values but not in ours, and this seems to be a
sly little dig at our smug lines of good and
bad. We are horrified about people who have
affairs and talk of them in hushed tones, never
thinking that perhaps in another light they
12
are just as moral as we are. Coward seems to
be in revolt (a subtle one, though) at a form
of society which draws rigid lines of right and
wrong with no place for things in between or
for exceptions.
He shows us what happens when people
are forced to work out their lives in the man­ner
dictated by the Victorian age. Sometimes
it results in howling comedy, such as in "Pri­vate
Lives" and "Design for Living," and again
in results in the tender, heart-searching pathos
of "Still Life."
Despite the fact that he nonchalantly states
in the introduction to "Play Parade" that peo­ple
persist in reading far too much into his
plays, nevertheless the stuff, whether he in­tended
it or not, is there. .
He may have written certain plays with his
tongue in his cheek for the pure monetary re­turn
they would yield him. He may be writing
plays from the standpoint of "Aha! This will
get 'em." But I defy anyone to belittle the real
earnestness and sincerity displayed in "The
Vortex," "The Astonished Heart," "Still Life"
and similar works. There is contained in these
plays a deep understanding of human nature,
its perplexities and inevitable way in which our
lives are complicated and controlled. If, in the
working out of them his style fails to reach the
height of excellency attained by his ideals, we
must remember his youthful years and give
him the benefit of immaturity.
He has attained an unusually high standard
of excellence in his line of comedy. No matter
why, when, or how, they were written, they
are excellent for their entertainment value and
the sheer comedy of the lines, theme, char­acters
and situations. I feel that he has reached
his peak in this line of creation and that if he
is to show further progress he must dip back
into plays like "The Vortex" and play up their
sincere earnestness, put forward his theory of
relative values and smash our smug puritanism,
but do it much more artfully and forcefully
than before.
I feel that he has reached the turning point
of his career. It lies in his hands to make him­self
a writer of successful, witty, amusing
comedies which mayor may not prove of last­ing
nature, or to become a writer of drama,
deep, powerful, searching, universal not only in
its own age but true for succeeding generations
-unafraid to speak its ideals in the face of
convention.
f;i~~~HE obvious things about American
music are first, that there is little of
~""""'~l:.Iill real significance, and second, that most
of this little was written roughly after 1880.
It is not difficult to understand why this should
be so.
The first settlers in America were almost
exclusively English, and in view of the high
position occupied by England in the musical
world in the early 17th century, it has seemed
reasonable to wonder why there was so little
musical activity among the transplanted Eng­lish.
It is comparatively easy to criticize the
Puritans, and the result has been, of course,
that they have been made responsible for most
of the more depressing features of American
life. But it is neither fair nor correct to explain
the dearth of musical activity in young Amer-conditions
under which the early settlers lived.
The frontier-beloved of the history depart­ment-
has influenced American art no less than
American politics. Life was rural, harsh, full
of uncertainty-e-conditions obviously not con­ducive
to the nurture of art-e-and most import­ant,
there was little leisure in which to produce
an enjoy music. A frontier community is poor
-and two notable results were the absence of
cathedrals and therefore of a tradition of choral
singing, and the absence of any patronage of
the arts. It was not until the frontier receded
that the older communities had any opportuni­ties
for music.
For over one hundred years, New England's
music was largely psalmody-ultimately so
badly sung that a melody sung in time and in
tune was offensive. By 1760, however, secular
* * * * * * * * *
EUTERPE AMERiCA-By
Alberta Shearer
* * * * * * * * *
ica by saying, inthe words of an early patriotic
ballad, "New England's God forever reigns."
New England's God was a stern God, and the
elect in America were probably even more
stern, but there is no sufficient evidence to
prove that either of them ever legislated against
music, which was
"to be sung in private houses for their
godly solace and comfort, laying apart all
ungodly Songs and Ballads, which tend
only to tJ.e nourishment of vice and the
corrupting of youth,"
Such an austere attitude, .though it did not
deny music, naturally tended to encourage
music of a certain character, and this explains
why the earlier American music is New Eng­land
psalmody. In pursuit of the economic .vir­tues
and of the worldly success which was evi­dence
of divine favor, the Puritans probably
felt that music for its own sake was, if not sin­ful,
at least impractical and unproductive-an
attitude which has had an unfortunate persist­ence.
If the Puritan temperament was not parti­cularly
congenial to music, neither were the
13
music had crept stealthily into the lives of New
Englanders, and the number of concerts that
were performed is really quite surprising. The
same thing was true, of course, of other parts
of the country - Boston, Philadelphia, New
York and Charleston being centres of consider­able
musical activity.
Of equal importance with the frontier has
been immigration. Beginning at the close of
the 17th century, a real impetus was given to
music, by German, Swedish and Moravian im­migrants,
who brought with them a highly
developed choral art, the extensive use of in­struments
and an appreciation of such works
as Haydn's "Creation" and "The Seasons." The
stream of immigration evidenced, especially
after 1848, as increasing urbanization and in­creased
railway mileage offered escape from
unrest in Europe. The influence of this immi­gration
.was extensive: most of the performers
were foreigners, many of the various musical
societies which were spring up were founded
by foreigners (e.g., Germania orchestra of
1848). More important, it meant the introduc-
tion of higher standards, because these foreign
musicians were all thoroughly trained.
Of course, this immigration raised the prob­lem
of whether it was preventing American
composers from getting a hearing. Once sepa­rated
from England, Americans had become
increasingly conscious of national feelings, but
not yet to the point of a declaration of inde­pendence
from Europe in art. In literature,
Washington Irving had started it, but it came
more slowly in music. Howard* believes that
the most important result of the invasion of
1848 was that it made the American composer
conscious of himself,· and "if at first he had to
fight for his existence with poor equipment and
meagre talents, the very contrast afforded by
his foreign rivals made an issue of his rights."
The pioneers in the awakening of a national
consciousness-men like Anton Heinrich, Wil­liam
Henry Fry and George Bristow-have
largely been forgotten, but not the things they
were insisting on, and many of their comments
remain true today.
Preoccupation with music w:as increasing in
the 19th century. A solid foundation was be­ing
laid by men like Lowell Mason, the pioneer
in music teaching in the public schools; his son
William, champion of high standards and fore­most
piano teacher of his day, and Theodore
Thomas, the conductor who practically carried
out a one-man revolution in music appreciation.
Finally there appeared musicians who are re­membered
for their music as much as for their
historical importance. John Knowles Paine
was the first American composer to win ser­ious
consideration abroad. But he and his con­temporaries
tended to be restricted in their in­dividuality
by the dominance of Germany in
the musical world. To some extent-the Boston
.group escaped this, notably Chadwick, whom
Howard considers American in his Yankee im­pertinence;
Foote, who was exceptional in that
he didn't study abroad, and, to a lesser degree
Horatio Parker and Mrs. Beach.
American music was climbing the heights,
and while it i~ hardly possible to consider
Ethelbert Nevin a peak of achievement, that
position can hardly be denied to Edward Mac­Dowell,
the first American composer of any
real stature, and (in Howard's words), "the
first of the Americans to speak consistently a
* J. T. Howard-"Our American Music."
14
musical speech that was definitely his own."
MacDowell brings us to the twentieth cen­tury,
and here the difficulty is to select and to
appraise American music, to judge its worth
and to see where it is going. In order to talk
about American music, it seems to be neces­sary
to have a rough working definition-such
as Howard's-
"a composer is an American, if by birth or
choice of permanent residence, he becomes
identified with American life and institu­tions
before his talents have had their
greatest outlet; and through his associa­tions
and sympathies he makes a genuine
contribution to our cultural development."
Residence alone does not establish a composer
as an American. Delius lived in Florida, but
his music is impossible to label. Most of us
would not consider Percy Grainger an Ameri­can,
yet he is an American citizen, and Howard
insists that he is "American in association,
sympathies, understanding," and that his music
is American in its idealism and in the verve
with which it translates the Anglo-Saxon-Old
English traits of our (Le., the Am.) heritage."
In spite of his long residence in the United
States, Ernest Black is too Jewish and too con­tinental
to be considered an Arrierican com­poser.
The recent refugees retain their con­tinental
manner and associations.
Just what characteristics make a composer
American? John Alden Carpenter is highly
American, and at the same time perhaps un­American
in his intense subjective feeling for
the moods of nature. Or is that an un-Ameri­can
characteristic? Since music can hardly be
produced in a vacuum, Charles Griffes may be
influenced by his German teachers, by French
impressionism and by Russian orientalism,
without ceasing to be an American. Daniel
Gregory Mason insists that Am!rican music is
necessarily eclectic and cosmopolitan, and that
its distinctiveness must be individual rather
than national.
In a survey such as this it is Impossible to
discuss even the most notable of the modern
American composers. Among the older group
I wouldmention Charles Martin Laeffler, John Charles Alden Carpenter, Charles Griffes, and Deems
Taylor; while outstanding among the younger
composers are Howard Hanson, Aaron Cop­land,
Roger Sessions, Howard MacDowell and
Roy Harris. Of these, Harris is frequently
spoken of as the most authentically American
voice among the modern composers. David
Ewen said of him:
"Here is as native an American product as
Carl Sandberg. His melodies are obviously the
speech of a Western temperament in its angu­lar
line. Its vitality is an expression of Ameri­can
health and youth"; and Horatio Parker
added that Harris is an American "first in a
pervading directness, in a recurring and un­affected
roughness of musical speech. . . He is
also American in broad design, full voice, a
certain abruptness. . . The rhythms are un­even,
unconventional, changeable, irregular.
There is no mistaking their propulsive force.
They seem to derive from the West that bred
Mr. Harris..."
There are two critics discerning distinctive­ly
American characteristics. Listening to mod­ern
American music, I can discern only one
note which seems to be common to them all,
and that is a certain bigness, a sense of breadth.
and space.
The American musical scene is not with­out
its encouraging features. Notable among
these are the lavish donations from wealthy
patrons, various forms of financial aid to tal­ented
students, funds to provide for the pub­lication
of American music, and various musi­cal
institutions of high standing. Frequently
mentioned as commendable are the interest
which women take in music, and the various
ingenious devices for calling attention to music
-these might be suspect as indicating a dan­gerous
faddishness. Recognition of music as a
part of general education has been widespread,
and in this field great advances have been
made. It is becoming i~creasingly evident that
America has a musical public.
Still, the picture is not one of unqualified
brightness. Less pleasant aspects are a certain
snobbishness which identifies Americanism
with immaturity and crudity, and the rever­ence
accorded to a European name and train­ing.
While this is decreasing to some extent in
the field of performance-American-born and
even American-trained performers being given
a hearing-a certain prejudice remains both in
performance and in composition.
The question of the American composer is
a fascinating one. The old complaint is that
composers do not make money from their com­positions,
hence the large percentage of them
who teach, conduct, or perform. Another com-
15
mon complaint is that the American composer
does not get a hearing-this is the subject of
many of Deems Taylor's Sunday afternoon
chats. The difficulty of getting a symphony
performed more than once or twice might ac­count
for the popularity of compositions in the
smaller forms. In 1929, there were 73 perman­ent
symphony orchestras, 55 chamber music
groups, 576 choral societies, and 35,000 public
school or university orchestras-which should
indicate a market for American work. But
many American works can be obtained only in
manuscript, and most of them are far less
easily available than the standard concert
works. Consequently, it is to the foremost
orchestras of the country that the composer
must turn, and here he comes face to face
with (as a rule) a European conductor. George
Bristow's complaint in 1854 that "the Philhar­monic
Society has been as anti-American as if
it had been located in London during the
Revolutionary War, and composed of native­born
British Tories," is probably an exaggera­tion,
but it indicates a state of affairs which in
.some cases still exists. And, as a rule, if an
American composer receives scant recogntion
in his own country, he usually faces even
worse in Europe.
The biggest question of all is, I suppose,
that of nationalism in music. In the middle of
the 19th century William Henry Fry declared
th~t there was no taste, love, or appreciation
for art in the United States. There was too
much servility on the part of American artists.
Until a declaration of independence in art
should be made, until American composers
should discard their foreign liveries and found
an American school, and until the American
public should learn to support American art­ists,
art would not become indigenous to this
country, but would only exist as a feeble exotic,
and Americans would continue to be provin­cials
in art. That was his contention, and it
might be rather depressing Jto reflect how much
of it still holds.
It is frequently contended that American
music will utilize the folk-music of the country.
The United States are rich in folk-music-s-that
of the Negro, of the American Indian particu­larly,
and also of the "hill billy," the cowboy,
the lumberjack. . Dvorak started the vogue of
using folk-music, and it was taken up by
(Continued on Page 25)
From MUNICH To SOFIA Fronl MUNICH "Whoever is master of Bohemia is master of Europe."-PRINCE VON BISMARCK.
chances of success in this sphere. In retrospect,
it has become increasingly evident that a free
and independent Czechoslovakia was the cor-t
I
SOFIA
t
'(
To
settlement of 1919 in eastern Europe by action
against Turkey and the Near Eastern status
quo as embodied in the Treaty of Lausanne. If
so, the occupation of Sofia improves Germany's
HE occupation of Bulgaria by German
armed forces marks a climax in the
extension of German control in central
and south-eastern Europe. Earlier efforts of the
National Socialist regime
were bent almost exclu­sively
towards the destruc­tion
of the Versailles status
quo in the west. From 1936,
the year of the formation of
the Rome-Berlin axis, and
more particularly from 1938,
the aim of Berlin had been
the disintegration of the
status quo established in
central and south-eastern
Europe by the Treaties of
St. Germain, Trianon and
Neuilly. By successive steps
the settlement drawn up in
the suburbs of Paris has
been upset. St. Germain
passed into history with the
occupation of Austria, the
Munich settlement and the
occupation of Bohemia; Tria­non
was almost completely
modified-by the Vienna con­ference
following Munich, by
the occupation of Ruthenia
by Hungary in 1939, and by
the partition of Transylvania
in 1940; Neuilly received its
first blow with the return of
the South Dobrudja to Bul­garia
last summer and is
now destined to be further
revised by the action of the
Bulgarian government in
linking its fate with the axis powers. It may
be the ultimate aim of German diplomacy to
complete the work of demolishing the peace
16
CD "The Strategic Importance of Czechoslovakia for
Western Europe," pp. 67-8.
Dr. Skilling can indeed be considered an authority on this matter. He 'mas
studying in Prague during the years of the Munich Pact and occupation of
Czechoslovakia.
In 1934 Dr. Skilling graduated in Political Science from the University of
Toronto. He went to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar and studied there from 1934
to 1936. In 1940 he received his Doctor of Philosophy degree in London, England.
He made a special study then of Czech-German relationships.
For the last year he has been with our own History Department.
"Vox" is pleased to present Dr. Skilling's article to its readers. It extends to
him its best wishes.
r
rIA
:f !I
~ction
atus
. e. If
~any's
~spect,
~ free
~ cor­i
By
H. G. Skilling, Ph.D.
ner-stone of the whole structure of peace and
security in eastern Europe and that its de­struction
in 1938 by the four western powers
opened the way for the German advance into
south-eastern Europe, now almost completed.
More than that, it rendered feasible a challenge
by Germany of the predominance of France
and Britain in the Near and Middle East and
India. Of this many Czechs were well aware.
Colonel Moravec, Czech military expert, wrote
in 1936: "If this territorial pentagon between
five seas (The Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, the
Mediterranean, the Red Sea and the Indian
Ocean) constitutes the 'vestibule' to the Indian
Ocean and to India, the Balkan Entente repre­sents
the main stairway to this vestibule and
the Little Entente its garden wall in which
Czechoslovakia represents the gate, Whoever
can break open that gate can reach that stair­way
and thence enter the vestibule."CD It might
be added that at Munich Mr. Chamberlain and
M. Daladier gave Hitler the key to the gate.
It is not out of place, at a moment when
German troops are a few miles from Salonika
and from Istanbul, to examine the strategic
significance of this fact and to glance back over
the chain of events which produced it. That­not
speculation as to future possibilities-is the
purpose of this article. The writer is keenly
aware that even before publication the last
word in the tide ,of this article might well bear
changing to "Belgrade" or "Salonika," yes, or
even Istanbul. But the content of the, article
would likely need no change-merely a post­script
to describe the later phases of a con­tinuous
development.
The question-who is to control south­eastern
Europe and hither Asia-has always
been a major concern to the European powers. .
17
Before the Great War, the Danube basin was
largely subject to the political rule of the Haps­burgs,
whereas the Near East and to some ex­tent
the Balkan peninsula were domains of the
Ottoman Turks. The area of conflict was
therefore limited to the Balkan region, includ­ing
the Bosphorus - Marmora - Dardanelles
waterway, where Turkish rule was either in­secure
or already thrown off. The continuing
weakening of Turkish rule and the rivalry of
neighbouring powers for the legacy of the Sul­tans
made the "Eastern question," as it was
then called, a matter of vital interest for the
Concert of Europe and for the Great Powers
individually. The conflict of 1914-1918 saw the
whole area in the hands of the Central Powers,
partly as a result of the collaboration of Bul­garia,
Austria-Hungary and Turkey with Ger­many,
partly as a result of the successful mili­tary
campaigns against Rumania and Serbia.
Indeed, more than this, the Central Powers con­trolled
the entire length of the land route from
Berlin to Bagdad, from the North Sea to the
Persian Gulf. The importance of German con­trol
of this route-the "transversal Eurasian
axis," as it has been called-is too obvious to
need emphasis. Strategically, it meant the seal­ing
of the "back door" to Germany by way of
the Balkans, the separation of Russia from her
western allies and the exposing of the flanks
of Russia and the British Empire-in the Cau­casus,
and in Egypt and the Suez respectively.
Economically, it meant the control of a vast
area rich in resources-in particular the con­trol
of the oil-producing regions of Rumania
and the Middle East. Politically, it would have
given Germany and her allies an enormous
advantage in the struggle for redistributing
territorial possessions at the end of a victorious
war, providing direct access to Africa, the Near
East and India. It is significant that Britain
sought desperately throughout the war to re-
gain control of the "Eurasian axis" at a n~m­ber
of widely separated points. What has Just
been said of its importance goes far to explain
the British drive into Mesopotamia from the
Persian Gulf, the Allenby campaign in Pales­tine,
the occupation of Salonika and the at­tempt
to seize the Dardanelles.
With the peace settlement after 1918, the
area of possible conflict between the Great
Powers in eastern Europe was enlarged by the
destruction of the Hapsburg and the Ottoman
Empires and the establishment of a number of
small and relatively weak states in their place.
. Turkey retained the all-important gateways
between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean
and between Europe and Asia, but the coast
of the Eastern Mediterranean and its hinter­land
fell under British and French control and
Central and Eastern Europe was subjected to
French influence. Almost a complete reversal
of position had occurred, although the control
exercised by France and Britain was not as
complete as the war control.exercised by Ger­many
and her allies. Nonetheless, Germany,
instead of dominating the whole of the land
route from Hamburg to the Persian Gulf, found
that her control ended at her own frontier.
The Czech frontier guards along the Sudeten
mountains personified the change in strategic
relations which had occurred. As long as the
Czech state remained independent and in the
French camp, as long as Austria preserved the
independence guaranteed by the Treaty of St.
Germain, as long as Italy, controlling the
Brenner pass and Trieste, the western entrance
to the Danube basin, resisted revisionism and
German expansion, Germany was entirely shut
off from the entire Danubian and Balkan re­gion.
Furthermore, an elaborate structure_ of
pacts and agreements was built up by the
victor states in that region-in the form 9£ the
Little Entente and the Balkan Entente-to en­circle
and render impotent the two potential
allies of Germany: Hungary and Bulgaria.
Austria and Poland, if not friendly, were at
least not at first on intimate terms with the
Reich and acted as buffer states. Czecho­slovakia,
linked with France and Russia after
1935, counted on their immediate intervention
in case of a German aggression. Linked with
Rumania in the Little Entente, Czechoslovakia
indirectly controlled the whole of the great
protective arc of the Carpathians and the
18
Transylvanian Alps which shields the Danube
basin from attacks from north and east, and
had access to the Black Sea. Linked with
Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia indirectly control­led
the eastern coast of the Adriatic and the
mountains to the south and west of the Danube
basin, thus enjoying a safeguard in the event
of an Italo-German rapproachement. Finally,
Czechoslovakia's allies-Rumania and Yugo­slavia-
were linked, in the Balkan Entente,
with Turkey and Greece on the Aegean and
could expect their assistance if subjected to an
attack by a Great Power, joined by a Balkan
state.
Munich withdrew the lynch-pin and caused
the collapse of this structure of security. An­other
Czech-Hubert Ripka, noted journalist­wrote
in "Munich: Before and After," "The
fall of Czechoslovakia opened for Germany
an unimpeded passage to the whole Danube
basin."0 True, the defences of central and
south-eastern Europe had already been weak­ened
before September, 1938. The abandon­ment
of Austria by Mussolini (July, 1936), the
formation of the Rome-Berlin Axis (October,
1936), and the treaty of friendship between
Italy and Yugoslavia (March, 1937), had open­ed
up gaps in the defence works of the Danube
basin and the Balkan peninsula. The annexa­tion
of Austria in March, 1938, put Germany
on the Danube at Vienna and exposed Hun­gary
and Yugoslavia to increased Axis pres­sure.
Nonetheless, until Munich, the fortress
of Czechoslovakia remained outside German
control, rendered any German military ad­vance
down the Danube dangerously exposed
on its northern flank, and formed the central
point in the east-west axis, Paris-Prague­Moscow,
designed to discourage German ag­gression.
Munich reversed the situation com­pletely.
The east-west axis collapsed com­pletely,
as a result of France's default in her
obligations. The fortified Sudeten range passed
into German hands, leaving the rump of
Czechoslovakia helpless against a German' at­tack.
The Czech threat to a German advance.
down the Danube was removed; the danger of a
war on two fronts needed no longer to bulk so
large in Hitler's calculations. The Little En­tente
ceased to be of any practical importance.
Hungary, having secured parts of Slovakia in
.'
0p.301.
rectification of the "Trianon dictate," was more
than ever exposed to German influence and
joined theanti-comiritern pact in February,
1939. The promise of a guarantee of the new
borders of Czechoslovakia by the Munich
powers was never fulfilled.
The occupation of Bohemia and Moravia
and the establishment of an independent Slo­vak
puppet state in March, 1939, carried the
process a few stages further. The last vestiges
of Czech independence disappeared, and Ger­man
troops were in "peaceful" occupation.
of the Moravian plain and of the Danube as far
as Bratislavia.
Military control of a section of the Carpath­ians
on the 'Slovak-Polish frontier passed into
German hands through her domination of Slo­vak
policy and provided a further safeguard
against eventual Polish or Russian assaults
from Galicia. The seizure by Hungary of the
extreme eastern tip of what had been Czecho­slovakia
- Ruthenia or Carpatho-Ukraine­gave
her, and hence indirectly Germany, com­mand
of another section of the Carpathians,
including the important Uzok pass linking
Lwow in Poland with the Theiss valley in
Hungary. British guarantees to Poland, Ru­mania
and Greece and the opening of negotia­tions
with the Soviet Union seemed, however,
to augur a change in 'British policy towards
Eastern Europe. Although Central Europe had
passed firmly into German hands, there still
seemed a possibility that her control there
might be shaken from north and east and that
further expansion into the Balkans proper
might be prevented.
The failure to reach agreement with the
U.S.S.R. and the early collapse of Poland
after the outbreak of war iIfaugurated a new
phase in the German penetration of the Balkan
peninsula. Poland was eliminated from. the
European military and diplomatic scene, and
the whole of the Slovak northern frontier thus
rendered immune from attack. .At the same
time the failure of Britain. and France to give
effective aid to Poland diminished the value of
their guarantees to states on the periphery of
the region of conflict. On the other hand, Rus­sia's
dash across eastern Poland, although ap­parently
conceived as a measure of defence of
her own territories against future German ag­gression,
affected the strategic situation of Ger­many
in south-eastern Europe. The Soviet
Union did not secure a common frontier with
German-controlled Slovakia along the Carpath­ians,
but did achieve a common frontier with
Hungarian-controlled Ruthenia in another sec­tor
of the Carpathians. In this way she pre­vented
any possible German advance into
Rumania from the north and protected the
Ukraine against invasion from German forces
entering Russian territory through the passes
of the Carpathians. At the same time the Red
Army was now for the first time stationed on
the Carpathians and constituted a permanent
threat to the German-controlled Danube. The
seizure of Bessarabia and the Bukovina in
June, 1940, although primarily a defensive
move, also had important results for south­eastern
Europe. Russian troops now looked
across the Pruth River into the Moldavian
plain and towards the Ploesti oilfield at the
south-eastern tip of the Carpathian horseshoe;
Russian troops were occupying Cernauti, in the
Bukovina, at the head of the railway leading
through Moldavia toPloesti. In addition,
Soviet forces were now stationed at one of the
mouths of the Danube, across from Dobrudja,
and were thus brought much closer to Bul­garia
and to Bucharest. Collective resistance
. to German advance by Rumania and Bulgaria,
assisted by the Soviet Union, might have turn':'
ed the tide of German success even at that late
date and kept German troops north-west of the
Iron Gate on the Danube and of the Transyl­vanian
Alps.
Germany realized the danger and at once
took advantage of the divisions within the Bal­kan
states and of the hostility of Balkan gov­ernments
to the U.S.R.R. Hungary and Bul­garia
were used as instruments of pressure on
Rumania, who, fearing to turn to Russia for
aid, was thereby isolated. In August, Rumania
was forced to agree to the cession of Southern
Dobrudja to Bulgaria. More important still,
the Vienna "arbitration" settled the Hungarian­Rumanian
conflict by the partition of Transyl­vania,
granting Hungary a part of her terri­torial
claims against Rumania, The decision
was made, however, not so much to satisfy
Hungarian revisionist sentiment as to satisfy
Germany's strategic requirements. The part­ition
was so devised as to give to Hungary,
Germany's partner, a new boundary running
along the Carpathian range to the bend in the
arc. This exposed the Moldavian plain to an
19
eventual German descent from the mountains
and to some extent counteracted the Russian
advance to the Pruth already mentioned. Not
satisfied with this, in mid-October, 1940, Ger­many
secured permission from the pro-German
Antonescu regime in Rumania to send troops
into that country through Hungary. Germany
thus protected herself further against the
U.S.S.R. and at the same time put herself in a
position to take full advantage of an Italian
victory in the forthcoming Albanian campaign.
It might well have been expected that Italy
would make short work of Greece and that
Germany would then join her in putting pres­sure
on Bulgaria and Turkey. As it turned
out, what was intended as an offensive action
by the Axis became a measure of defence
against the successful Greek army, and more
and more troops were poured into Rumania.
From December onward, a spate of rumours
indicated that Germany would invade Bul­garia.
It did not then occur, but it could not
be overlooked that a further stage of German
penetration of the Balkans had been accom­plished.
German troops were now on the lower
reaches of the Danube and on the Black Sea.
The British guarantee to Rumania had lapsed.
. The German diplomatic offensive at the end
of November had brought Hungary, Rumania
and Slovakia into the tri-partite alliance of
Germany, Italy and Japan. One member of the
Balkan Entente-Rumania-was helpless in
the grip of an occupying army, and another­Greece-
was battling in Albania against Italian
forces. Yet their fellow members of the En­tente-
Turkey and Yugoslavia-had not gone
to their help, having indeed no legal obligations
to do so. Nor had Turkey gone to the help of
Greece under the pact of 1933; by which the
two states had mutually guaranteed their com­mon
frontiers and pledged the use of military
force in their defence. Nonetheless, Bulgaria
and Yugoslavia had not joined the German-e
Italian camp, and Bulgaria gave no indication
that she was going to take advantage of the
situation to settle old claims against Greece,
as she had done against Rumania. It seemed
as though the tendency of Bulgaria to come
closer to the Balkan Entente, already indicated
by the treaty of friendship between Bulgaria
and Yugoslavia in January, 1937, and by the
treaty of friendship and non-aggression be­tween
Bulgaria and the Balkan Entente, in
July, 1938, was producing at least negative
results.
The occupation of Bulgaria by German
troops ends another phase in the extension of
German control of the Berlin-Bagdad axis.
German troops are now within a few miles of
the Aegean at Salonika and of the Bosphorus
at Istanbul. Bulgaria has thrown in her lot
with Germany, hoping, no doubt, to secure her
long-desired access to the Aegean in Thrace
and, possibly, to satisfy her claims on Mace­donia
in northern Greece and southern Yugo­slavia.
Her recent pact with Turkey, condemn­ing
aggression, seems to preclude direct attrack
by Bulgaria on Turkey or Greece, but does not
exclude German diplomatic or even military
pressure on one or other of these two. If Bul­garia
joined in the attack on Greece, Turkey
might consider herself bound, under the Bal­kan
Entente or the Greco-Turkish pact of
1933, to assist Greece. On the other hand, this
eventuality might not occur, if Yugovalia per­mitted
the passage of German troops down the
Morava-Vardar valley to Salonika. If for any
reason this proved impossible, Germany would
then have to take the more difficult route from
Sofia through the Struma valley into northern
Greece. In this case Turkey would be faced
with a difficult decision. She is pressed by her
ally, Britain, to enter the war in tardy fulfill­ment
of her obligations, give aid to Greece and
resist the German advance. She is pressed by
the Soviet Union, with whom her relations are
close and friendly, to keep out of the war, put
up a stiff diplomatic front to Germany, main­tain
her control of the Dardanelles and keep
British warships out of the Black Sea, and, if
necessary, to deflect the German advance west­wards
in the Balkans, away from the sphere of
Russian strategic interests. She will no doubt
defend herself against direct attack, with the
approval of Britain and Russia. What she
. would do in the event of a German penetration
of Yugoslavia or Greece is much more doubt­ful.
20
"Mountains and stars, clouds and the white sea-foam,
Flames, snows and children-should not these suffice,
But this hep,rt-breaking loveliness must come
Gleaming through all-life that willingly dies?"
-L LASCELLES ABERCROMBIE, "Inscription." ASCELLES ABERCROMBIE, "Inscription."
and bridges and monuments and, someday-a
cathedral. Tomorrow ..."
The choir was singing the anthem. How
loud it was! She wished it had been something
quiet and consoling. But this was Easter. One
had to be jubilant at Easter.
She remembered the last time they had
talked before he enlisted. Her arguments had
seemed so good. There was no need, she had
said, at least no pressing need; besides there
were greater ways in which he was to serve.
He had only smiled-s-klndly, but implying that
she didn't understand.
He had talked about believing in a thing
and being willing to pay the price. He had
talked about victory costing something. Still
she didn't understand.
Slowly as from a great distance words be­gan
to force themselves in upon her attention,
words that the minister was using-"the need
for sacrifice"-"the price of victory." These
were words that Bill had used. Suddenly she
came back to earth again, to the church with
its lily-decked altar, to the men and women
about her, to Easter. Was there any connection
between Easter and the things of which Bill
had spoken? But, of course-she saw now.
Easter meant exactly those things. Easter was
the story of a price that had been paid for Vic­tory.
She was beginning to understand. She
did understand.· She must write to Bill at once
-today. He would be glad to know that she
did understand. .
The letter arrived on the following morn­ing.
The envelope was addressed in an un­familiar
script and more an English postmark
in the corner. Eagerly and yet with a strange
fear she tore it open. As she unfolded the
sheet of paper something small and cold fell
into the palm of her hand.
"Dear Miss --," the letter began, "It is
with deep reluctance that I write to tell you of
the· death of Flying Officer William Davies,
who was killed in action on March 7th ..."
There was more-more about courage and dar­ing,
but somehow the words seemed blurred
and she couldn't understand them. And then
the last sentence. "He wanted me to send you
this ..."
She became conscious again of the small,
cold object in the palm of her hand. She looked
down. It was a thin chain of gold and on the
chain-a tiny cross.
The Letter T Byh Mearjorie Peck By Marjorie Peck
Letter
T WAS strange, Chris thought, how
far apart one's mind and body could
:r. , be. Take now, for instance. She sat in
church remotely conscious that one of the
notches in her spine was sticking uncomfort­ably
into the wooden seat. But her mind was
busy with a thousand shining things of mem­ory
which had not even the slightest connection
with her surroundings.
It was not that she made a practice of going
to church. She supposed that it would be pos­sible
to count on the fingers of one hand the
times she had attended in the last year, but­well,
it was Easter and Bill would have liked
her to go. She wondered vaguely whether Bill
would be able to attend an Easter service. Per­haps
there were too many important things in
England which left no time for churches and
for Easter.
Mechanically she rose with the congregation
to sing the opening hymn. She was annoyed at
having her thread of thought broken. When it
was over she sat down and took up the thread
again.
She remembered the -days--student days­soon
after they had first met. A dozen inci­dents
from that crazy, carefree time crowded
back into her consciousness. There was the
night when they had ...
She became aware that the offering was in
process. She reached in her purse for a quarter.
There was only a dime in change. Oh well, it
would have to do.
She remembered those other occasions, not
so frequent, when he had led her up his high
hill of dreams from whose tall summit, hand in
hand, they had' looked out over the rolling vista
of the future. With the deep enthusiasm of the
artist within him, he would draw before her
eyes his design for that future. "Today, Chris,"
he would say, "it's books and blueprints. To­morrow
I'll make them come alive-buildings
21
"I've lo~t my ticket for the tow."
.. Just give the man a Sweet Cap. '!
SWEET CAPORAL CIGARETTES
"The purestform in which tobacco can be smoked"
22
UNITED COLLEGE MUSIC CLUB
A GRAND DUEL
lWJ J " HERE are you going?"
.,~ "The College Music Club."
. ._, "Say, I hear it's really good."
"We're doing Tschaikowsky tonight; you
should be there. Fred Brickenden and Doug
Tunstell are staging a grand duel-I've waited
a month for this."
They trodded on for another half block,
when finally one turned, ascended the steps of
a nice warm home, and bid his companion
adieu. I followed swiftly. When we entered,
the following dialogue had already com­menced.
Brickenden-Ldon't see why Tschaikowsky
can't be placed beside the three B's. In his
music there is a breadth of passion and emotion
which no other composer has ever equalled---
Tunstell-Thank heaven! I never heard
such a galaxy of dismalno~es chained together
in one unhealthy phrase. 'He lacks any sense
of balance, yet he is not brilliant enough to be
called original.
Brickenden-But his melodies-where have
you heard such heart-rending, beautiful mel­odies?
Tunstell-What's beautiful about morbidity
and frustration the, way he hammers at it?
Glorified misery-that's all it is! How glorious
and wonderful it must be to wallow in the ditch
shouting cries of animalistic force as you swal­low
thorn after thorn!
Brickenden - But can't you appreciate
Tschaikowsky's music as music?
Tunstell-In a way-- but that is not our
purpose here tonight. We were asked to de­cide
if Tschaikowsky belongs among the great
composers of classical music such as Bach,
Beethoven, and Brahms.
Brickenden-s-Well, doesn't he?
Tunstell-Absolutelynot! Take his con­temporary
Brahms, who outstrips him on every
point. "None but the Lonely Heart" looks
absolutely sick beside the "Sapphic Ode" or
23
In which a Great Russian's
Bones are Almost Disturbed Bones "Von Ewiger Liebe." There is not a chorus of
Tschaikowsky's to compare with Brahms'
"Ossians Fingal" or the "Liebeslieder Waltzes,"
and any of Tschaikowsky's piano works just
wilt when set beside Brahms' Intermezzi or
the Variations on a Theme by Paganini, And
the Concertos! Surely you will not dare to
suggest that the B flat minor piano Concerto of
Tschaikowsky can approach the one in D
minor of Brahms in point of greatness. Then
consider Brahms' superb Violin Concerto-an
absolute monument in violin writing. Please
don't mention Tschaikowsky's Concerto in the
same breath. And then Chamber Music:
Tschaikowsky gives us nothing comparable to
the quartets, trios and duets of Brahms.
Brickenden-But the Symphonies!
Tunstell-Oh, the devil! They're absolutely
worn out! It's a good thing jazz occasionally
dusts off the precious mould from a lot of his
melodies-they certainly become monotonous.
In short, Tschaikowsky wrote' nothing that I
could compare with the majestic grandeur of
Brahms' Symphony in C minor.. Just because
Brahms doesn't wail at a melody and use every
tear-jerking contrivance at his disposal that is
not to say that he is unemotional or that he is
divorced from reality.
Brickenden-Hold on here! Let me get this
straight. Do you suggest that Brahms is more
sincere than Tschaikowsky?
Tunstell-Well, I know that old Peter lived
an abnormal life and I suppose he did write
from the heart. But just because a composer
mixes a shade of rationalism into his music
you cannot say that he is less sincere. Music
is a science and a craft; emotions by themselves
will never make for greatness.
Brickenden-You cannot deny Tschaikow­sky's
popularity. Millions can't be wrong!
Tunstell-They most certainly can! Just
because the public cannot rise above the mere
sensuality of life let us not suppose that mere
sensuality is great.
Brickenden-Tschaikowsky's music is im­mortal
music-immortal because of its sin­cerity
and passion.
Tunstell-Immortal? I feel the reason for
Beethoven's immortality is that he never says
the same thing twice. His symphonies are so
full of the reality of life that we learn some­thing
new each time we listen to them. Tschai­kowsky
becomes boring after continual repeti­tion
because his music always tells the same
old woeful tale.
Brickenden-But what about Tschaikow­sky's
mastery of the orchestra? Surely no one
could challenge him on that point.
Tunstell-I grant you he has mastered
orchestral technique just as Liszt mastered
pianoforte technique. But that neither makes
Liszt or Tschaikowsky great composers.
Brickenden-Why not appreciate Tschai­kowsky
by himself?
Tunstell-A breath of fresh air was prob­ably
what killed the frustrated introvert! You
have to compare him with someone in order to
evaluate his place in music--
Brickenden-Which I still maintain is great!
Tunstell"::"Which I still maintain is feeble! !
* *I * *
Silence!
* * * *
Dr. Thompson finally broke the tension by
announcing that he thought we should now
listen to some Tschaikowsky. A recording of
the fourth Symphony followed (much to the
disgust of Mr. Tunstell and the delight of Mr.
Brickenden). Then Gordon Harland sang
"None but the Lonely Heart," accompanied at
the piano by Florence Adamson. Then came
Don Pratt's touching performance of the second
movement of the violin Concerto-Dennis Ro­berts
played the orchestral part on the piano.
Margaret Randall climaxed the entertainment
with selections from "The Seasons."
Betty Morrison followed with a sympath­etic
appreciation of Tschaikowsky's life.
Ramona Oland read passages from Tilman's
book on Symphonic Music and although they
24
agreed the reading was quite pleasing, they
felt the contents were positively ghastly.
What followed would require a combination
of Foster Hewitt and John Milton to narrate.
Bodies were removed so swiftly that the pros­pect
of Dr. Thompson finding himself com­pletely
alone was not remote.
Miss Adamson-I hope they don't decide to
drag up Tschaikowsky's bones to solve the
situation.
Miss Randall-There's nothing like a good
old skeleton to bring people back to their
senses!
Referee Pratt judged the meeting a good
one. An ancient custom of the Music Club is
to appoint a different critic for each meeting,
the purpose being to give each member an op­portunity
at musical criticism. Don Pratt seized
the honor for that evening and Brickenden
and Tunstell both trembled when the minute '
book was finally exposed.
Perhaps
I saw a rose with dew upon it ...
Dew drops like luminous pearls
Hanging as a necklace, shimmering on every leaf
And quivering on the soft-red, curling petals.
I saw that rose as the pale dawn broke
Over a mountain top. . . I watched it as
The pink-gold light glowed upon its leaves and
Filled the earth with a shaking rainbow day.
1 thought that rose was Beauty
And I caught my breath in wonderment and
thrill.
But even as I watched the dew-hung flower
A deer with limpid eyes, deep with dreams,
crossed the grass
And scattered all the rose leaves and the dew.
My "Beauty" gone, only my memory remained
among the broken leaves.
But perhaps the deer Was Beauty truly . . .
For the deer is Life and pulsing mov~ment, and
The rose was still and bloodless . . .
Perhaps the deer is Beauty everlasting . . .
DONNA McRAE.
Euterpe America
(Continued from Page 15)
American composers for one of two motives­either
to make something out of the melodyor
as a means of shaking. off the European yoke.
Composers like Cadman, MacDowell and
Guion have used folk-music. But nationalism
is something subtler than using Indian or other
tunes found in America. MacDowell realized
this: "I do not believe in lifting a Navajo theme
and furbishing it into some kind of a musical
composition and calling it American music.
Our problem is not so simple as all that." And
in a lecture he said, "What we must arrive at is
the youthful optimistic vitality and the un­daunted
tenacity of spirit that characterizes the
American man. That is what I hope to see
echoed in American music."
American music can probably never be na­tional
in the sense that Russian or Norwegian
music is-s-i.e., music of a single race. The
character of the "melting pot" has stamped it­self
indelibly on American life. A Negro folk­melody
is exotic to a Polish-American. Cos­mopolitanism
will be a characteristic of Ameri­can
music, rather than a basis in raciality.
Composers, therefore, have followed Mac­Dowell's
lead, and turned to American life,
utilizing skyscrapers and flivvers, and also less
concrete things-American youthfulness, vigor,
optimism, idealism. Many have felt that jazz
offers the best medium for composers who are
seeking to portray American life. Whiteman
and Gershwin sought to make an honest woman
out of jazz; and other more serious composers
have attempted to escape from its rigid limita­tions
and make it the basis for authentically
American music.
On the subject of Americanism in music,
the conclusion of Percy Grainger seems ade­quate:
"If any definitely American school
should at last emerge its specific qualities or
common denomination will probably represent
what is distinctive in American life and thought
rather than a new raciality. And it will not
come by deliberately adopting this idiom or
thought, for a national composer is such only in
so far as he is personal in his expression and so
far as his personality happens naturally to
affirm a nationality." For after all, in music
as in literature, Americanism is not in itself
an epithet of blame or praise, but merely a
useful classification.
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25
.. Tomorrow begins Today
(Continued from Page 3)
society that the First Great War failed to up­set.
The state in the inter-war period was like
the first horseless carriage with its dashboard
and whipholder. As improvements came along
we kept the same old buggy-put a powerful
motor in it-a new set of wheels and a radio.
But it was still the same old chassis. The
traffic laws and the roads had all the indivi­dualism
of the horse and buggy days. Some of
the vehicles were guided by the discordant
shouting, pushing and pulling of all the occu­pants.
Others had one driver to whom nobody
dared speak. With intent gaze he headed di­rectly
for his goal. And it took the traffic jam
of the Second Great War to make us see the
necessity for remodelling, rebuilding, rechart­ing
and agreeing to limit the speed and direc­tion
of our cars to permit movement for all.
In the libraries and laboratories of the world
today there is a great accumulation of know­ledge.
Knowledge that can set us free if it can
be implemented in society. But our wisdom
lags and we use only the superfiicial benefits of
our discoveries - comforts, foods, clothing,
shelter, rapid transportation, health and lon­gevity.
These were given to us by the spirit
and the methods of Science'. But .unless they
are wisely used and distributed they become
dangerous.
We have increased the speed of life,~ but not
its tide and volume; we have increased its
. movement, but not its cubic content; we have
made life easier and freer, but we have not
strengthened its moral fibre. Science speeds
on and stateseraft creeps far in the rear. A new
world is here and the old moral and political
codes impede the way.
This state of affairs occurs again and again
in history. Someti~es the barriers are easily
pushed aside; sometimes a civilization fails to
get by. So fell Egypt, Greece and Rome.
Yet men always want to be righteous. They
want to obey the will of God. But they have
various ideas of the will of God and they lack
the engineering details of the way to become
righteous. "Be ye fruitful, multiply and re­plenish
the earth," was good advice to a no­madic
tribe of herdsmen. But in many places
and with many people on earth today it is
26
surely the wrong procedure. The Decalogue
might have been sufficient for the tribes of
Israel, but are most inadequate for the govern­ance
of the League of Nations. There has never
been a complete revelation. It is our sacred
responsibility to work out the codes that can
be sufficient unto our day. We must replace
the old laws which were tribal and immediate,
with new ones that are generational, cosmic
and immediate to our world-needs of today.
FOR THE first time in history we have a
. chance to become righteous, a chance to
measure truth, find the will of God and become
Christians in a fuller sense.
No one man can lead us out. No nation is
adequate. No age is sufficient or final.
Man through the ages tried to fly. Indivi­duals
were unsuccessful. But a science, which
took in the accumulated knowledge of the
ages gathered over the whole earth, was able
through co-operative effort to do the impos­sible.
Our great advances must always be "over
the tombs, forward." It is our world only for a
while; it was made for us to remake it for
posterity.
Individually we are so helpless! Collective­ly
we are strong. Imagine the power and
might of a thousand million ~nlightened souls
possessed of the sacrificial spirit of the soldier,
working in times of peace to make a world
that is clean, safe and happy for all. Think of
these people armed with the microscope; the
telescope, the spectroscope, the test-tube and
the statistician's curve, motivated by the re­search
institute method and guided by the
spirit of service and brotherhood. All that is
almost within our reach if we but dedicate our­selves
to Democracy and Christianity as we so
often profess to do.
Democracy and Christianity go hand in
hand. The former grows out of the three basic
principles of the latter.
First, the belief in the matchless value of
human personality. This taken by itself leads
to the save-your-own-soul attitude and the
license of laissez-faire if not guided by the
second principle which is that of the brother­hood
of man. Out of the latter principle comes
the fallacy that all men are equal and the top
must be kept down to the level of the bottom
if we are not motivated by another belief.
This third principle is the belief in love or
service. My service must be commensurate
with my talents. I must believe in the rights of
all men; I would take counsel with them and
serve the best ideals with all my might. Surely
the days of rugged individualism are dead.
We have left behind the great search for
individual wealth. Life became a great race
for getting, wearing, eating, drinking and be­ing
treated for over-indulgence.
Truly our standards of living went up. Be­ing
well-dressed and well-fed, the individual
gained a sense of importance; talked of his
rights; knew he could rise from rags to riches
and' tried to do so. He emphasized democracy
because it was good for business. Talked glibly
of liberty and used it to excess. Nothing fails
like excess.
Now is the time for some simple truths and.
much heart-searching to tie together the three
principles we mentioned and thus make a start
at having Democracy and Christianity in our
daily lives.
So far, except in a few places for a few
people and for a few brief moments, this world
has been only a place in which to fight and
freeze and starve, with now and then a snatch
of poetry, song and wine. And yet we know
that it could be made a congenial, decent home
in which to live, to love, to marry and to raise
children, who could carryon the torch.
The medi~eval world accepted its hard con­ditions.
You must suffer much here to get a
great reward in Heaven, said they. The old
Indian priest warned the youth on coming to
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manhood: "You are born into a world of suf­fering.
Suffer, then, and hold your peace!"
For us, such attitudes spell defeatism and
we shall not accept them. We refuse to be
daunted by the failure of a generation or an
age. We believe that the Brotherhood of Man
can become a reality; that individualism can
be balanced with socialism; that business and
Christianity can be compatibles and that
Democracy, though as yet a theory in many
ways, has in it all the possibilities of a finer
world than mankind has ever known.
We believe in our cause freely; we will fight
for it; we feel that it is good for us and will
ultimately be good for our enemy.
Truly we are attending a world commence-·
ment, led by the democracies. It is our duty,
in the light of Science and Christianity, to work
out the new moral codes of our age; embody
them in social life and institutions; crystallize
them into laws and constitutions; develop them
in personal character, customs and ideals; and
thus provide mankind with a new frame of
social thinking adequate for the broader needs
of tomorrow.
But we cannot wait until tomorrow. Destiny
is crowding us so fast that we must be hard at
selecting our course now. Every weakness in
our plan, every delay in our action makes the
future struggle many times worse than it need
be. The waste and wanton destruction of this
war has surely brought home to us the in­efficacy
of not facing life as it is and preparing
ourselves in time. Truly tomorrow must always
begin today.
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ON," called Mrs. Mackay, "Don!" With
a little shrug, the boy put down his
.--..c.iI1 fretsaw. "Yes, mother," he answered
from the basement workroom where he had
been shaping out a pair of bookends, made
with a graceful design of maple leaves. He
went upstairs to the kitchen, which was warm
and full of the smell of freshly-baked short­bread.
Mrs. Mackay stood at the table, filling a box
with the fresh cookies. Her merry plump face
was flushed and wisps of grey hair had slipped
out of place as she worked. As Don came into
the kitchen she turned, with a worried ex­pression,
and asked, "Will you run over to Mrs.
Sutherland's with these cookies? She wants
them for the St. Andrew's Day Anckew's Day tea this after­noon."
"Sure," Don answered, filling his mouth
with a couple of broken bits of shortbread and
l~oing to the tap to wash his hands.
Mrs. Mackay looked at him as he stood
.aere, tall, freckled-face. blue eyes, sandy hair
with the two unruly cowlicks that would never
stay down with any amount of combing. He
had changed so much lately since he had
started to college. One never knew what he
was thinking any more.
"Don," she said, trying to sound quite
casual, "why don't you ask Mary Sutherland
.to that college dance? I'm sure she'd enjoy it."
He dried his hands without replying. "Is
this the box?" he asked.
"Yes," his mother replied. "You can tell
her I'll be down at the tea about half-past
four."
"O.K." He picked up the parcel and went
out. From the small cluttered backshed he
took his bike, trundled it down the steps, and
started off but without whistling as usual.
His mother thought he should ask Mary
Sutherland to the dance, because she was
Scotch, and the daughter of family friends.
Mary was nice, all right, but she didn't go to
28
college. Mum didn't quite understand. She
felt he should always move in the same little
circle of respectable, middle-class Scotch folk.
But, there was Olga.
Olga had come from Ukraine with her par­ents
when she was eight. She had wanted to
come to college and by dint of working as a
clerk, or waitress, in the holidays and doing
housework for her board, she had managed it.
You couldn't help but respect a girl like that.
Olga was fun, too; she took part in all their
Glass activities. They went to History Club to­gether
and had represented their year as a
debating team several times. Olga was clever,
but her family on the farm never seemed to
understand or sympathize with her ambitions.
For them Ukraine was the homeland still, and
the farm-work was their one interest. Canada
did not really claim their allegiance.
Yet suddenly Don began to wonder whether
his family, who had been in this country for
three generations, were much better. Scotch
songs, Scotch poetry,-all these things were
more important than anything Canadian in his
mother's eyes. A line ot"poetry he had often
heard her quote flashed into his mind-
"And they in dreams behold the Hebrides."
That was it,-not Canada but the "dim shieling
and the misty islands" of Scotland were his
people's country. He had often heard the
question of how Canada lacked national spirit
discussed. Perhaps this was part of the answer.
He had reached Sutherland's house now,
and went to the door with the parcel. Mary
met him and asked him in, but he refused, on
the grounds that he had work to do.
"Nothing but study for you college people!"
teased the girl.
"Could be worse things!" grinned Don. As
he started home he realized again that these
old associations meant less to him now than
the new ones he was making with all sorts of
people at college.
At home again, his mother met him. "Did
you deliver them safely?"
"Yes," he answered. Then realizing what
she wanted to know, he. said suddenly "I'm
going to take Olga Lazecho to the dance,
mother."
"Why, Don!" exclaimed Mrs. Mackay. "I
don't know her, do I? She's a foreigner, 1 sup­pose."
"No, she's Canadian, just as much, maybe
more than you or I. She's a grand kid, too. We
can't go on in little narrow circles of acquaint­anceship,
mum. There's a whole country full
of people to learn to know here."
Mrs. Mackay was silent, as Don went
downstairs and began thoughtfully to carve out
another graceful maple leaf on the bookends.
EDITORIAL
(Continued from Page 2)
The first counter attack on my contention
will come from the financial genii. They will'
wail in well-organized chorus-"We have no
large hall for our production. We must pay
for that accommodation and the only way we
can pay for it is to invite Mr. and Mrs. Winni­peg."
Granted. But even if it is necessary to in­vite
Mr. and Mrs. Winnipeg to pay for the
large hall, is it necessary to presume that they
are high class morons?
HERE we have a golden opportunity. There
is no professional stage in Winnipeg. A
few attempts have been made and very worthy
ones too. But even if our dramatic production
only runs for three days, why cannot we try to
present a play, instead of second-rate parade of
students in some bit of theatrical chicanery
which is just as unfair and unflattering to the
audience as it is to those taking part?
A student society, especially such an im­portant
one as the Dramatic Society, should
in its major production have the courage to
be a testing ground or a channel of direct com- ,
munication with Shaw or Sheridan or Shakes-.
peare.
If our University were situated in a college
town, instead of a metropolitan centre, we
would not have this tempetation to blame out­side
factors-financial reasons, or the tastes of
that vague group, the "general public," for our
ownlaxness in not realizing that the fine effort
put into this particular activity is being wasted.
We haven't the courage to attempt anything
beyond the somewhat banal drivel of a Broad-
29
way commercial success of hoary vintage.
After all, we are not supposed to be run­ning
our extra curricular activities for big
business reasons. Weare running them for
that "living" which we all worship so fervently
and abuse so dreadfully. The ideal state of
affairs would be to be able to run them without
outside support. The most practical compro­mise
in our situation would be to depend as
little as possible on outside support, retrench­ing
if necessary financially, and splurging in
ingenuity.
We, as students, are so fond of reforming
the world in general. Could we not also form
over a period of years an appreciative aud­ience
for drama in this not altogether Philis­tine
city of ours, thereby combining creative
energy with (dare 1 say it?) cultural enjoy­ment?
The start
is very
important. After
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( A Question, and an Answer? ' /( Question, and an Answer?
Why do 1 dare to dream
Of a tomorrow?
How can 1 think of happiness
And laughter when all th~
World is broken and will
Be spent and worn, when
My tomorrow comes?
How can 1 think of days of
Sunlight, warm and clinging,
Of water lapping on long shores?
Why do 1 remember rain
And violets beneath damp leaves . . .
The scent of roses, and the distant
Sound of bells hesitating in the winds?
Why do 1 think of poplars rustling,
And the clear, cool greenness of a
Valley path? Why do 1 dare to
Think of Beauty . . . or that
Tomorrow will be free?
Perhaps because 1 hope . . . as ages hoped
That when tomorrow dawns
The world will know itself in all
Its Beauty ... and all strife will
Cease.
Perhaps 1 dream of happiness,
And all the lovely things 1 have known,
Because 1 feel that somehow, by my dreaming,
The world will come to sanity again,
And know the dreams that have been
Clung to ... know the laughter
And the memories of things which
Made a world for some of us
Through long dark nights when the stars
Were very dim.
Perhaps those are the reasons for my dreaming ...
For a tomorrow will be sure to dawn.
-DONNA McRAE.
Today
There is a ceaseless murmuring and
Tears fall silently . . .
Dreams die in the darkness,
Quivering down like snow-stars
Through a winter hush, to be forgotten, crushed
And broken, underneath relentless marching feet.
Sighs tremble out across the silence
And the world is changed ...
Life and security have dropped from knowing,
All the warm small things have been
Torn away . . . and with so many others, my dream died.
The sigh of its passing echoed
Lonesomely around the spaces
Where once laughter clung ... 1 hear only.
Murmuring and the sigh of summer rain.
30
1 hear only water lapping lonely on
A barren shore. Wood plots are shorn of
F'eacefulness, of their brooding quiet, which
Is born of quiet and contentment.
There is an emptiness where friendship was ...
1 hear instead of bird cries, or the
Whirr of wings . . . instead of singing or
Music pulsing . . . 1 hear a distant
C1'ying and so many last farewells . . .
1 see a world in tears.
Is what 1 hear, this muffled throbbing,
Is it guns, or armies marching,
Children lonely, homeless, crying . . .
Or is it just the sobbing of my heart?
-DONNA McRAE.
By Enid Vivian Nemy
Mischa Elman
UTWAS Tuesday afternoon, March 11th, n at exactly three o'clock, 'and I was
... practically trembling from head to foot.
The idea of meeting Mischa Elman was thrill­ing
enough, but interviewing him-every time
I thought of it I became more and more fright­ened.
What if I should run out of questions and
topics of conversation and just sit and stare
dumbly, What if I asked a question that would
be considered too personal and be frozen with
an icy glance. Thus you more or less have an
idea of the state I was in when I walked into
the Royal Alex. that eventful day.
The clerk informed me that Mr. Elman was
at a writing table at the back of the rotunda.
I approached, softly and timidly. Mr. Elman
appeared to be absorbed in his letter, but he
soon looked up, and noticing me, asked if I was
the reporter from the University. Receiving an
affirmative answer he got up, shook hands and
led me to a comfortable armchair. The inter­view
had begun.
This was Mr. Elman's fifth concert in Win­nipeg.
His debut here was made on May 5th,
1911, in Central Church-just thirty years ago
-and he finds that audiences here are extreme­ly
appreciative, although they may not show
their enthusiasm in the same way as their emo­tional
South American neighbors. From Win­nipeg
he will travel to Edmonton, Calgary,
Vancouver and Victoria.
Summer months are supposed to be leisure
months, but they usually aren't. Open-air con~
certs in the Hollywood B9WI, and Los Angeles,
takes up considerable time, but Mr. Elman
says that he enjoys these summer concerts be­cause
people who otherwise couldn't afford to
attend are able to hear worth-while music.
31
For some years now the Elmans have made
New York their home. They have two children,
a daughter of fifteen and a son going on sixteen.
Neither of them are particularly interested in
music, but both take lessons, one piano and the
other violin. Occasionally when summer tours
are made, Mrs. Elman and the children accom­pany
him to South America, South Africa and
Europe.
Unlike Mrs. Brailowsky, the noted pianist's
wife, Mrs. Elman does not travel with her hus­band
on all long tours. Mr. Elman stated quite
frankly that he prefers having Mrs. Elman in
New York with the children, so that if any
emergency arose, his wife would be on hand.
As for jazz and all forms of popular music,
Mr. Elman says he just accepts them now as a
matter of course, and doesn't consider them
good or bad. He also doesn't play any favorites
in the classics. He doesn't care for one com­poser
or composition much more than another
and in choosing a programme Mr. Elman as­serted
that he knows what is better and plays
only that.
Then I mentioned that every student whose
parents came from Russia maintained, that
years and years ago, their mother or father
played with Mischa Elman. At this Mr. Elman
smiled and declared that so many people read
about him that they gradually come to believe
they actually know him. He added that similar
incidents are related to him in every city he
visits.
I forgot to mention that I was absolutely
determined to get Mr. Elman's autograph. How­ever,
you guessed it-I didn't. Somehow or
other my courage(?) failed me. Anyway, I was
afraid it would be considered rather juvenile
so I walked away with my head held high but
no signature.
Alumni Notes AluDlUiNotes
The large picture of the Wesley
College graduates in Arts of 1910 has
been missing from the walls of Con­vocation
Hall for some months.. It
contains among others the photo­graphs
of such prominent Winnipeg­gers
as C. V. Combe, W. R Cot­tingham,
Miss Salome Haldorson,
Harvey E. Kennedy, Dr. W. L. Mann,
and Dr. B. H. Olson. The blank
space on the wall is still awaiting its
return.
It was at the home of Dr. Salem G.
Bland in Toronto, that Marjorie C.
Elliott, '33. on March 29, became the
bride of Donald Robert Carr. The
ceremony was performed by Dr.
Bland, who from 1903 to 1917 was a
professor on the staff of Wesley Col­lege
and a colleague of the bride's
father. the late Dr. Jas. Elliott. Mr.
and Mrs. Carr will reside in Parry
Sound, Onto Mr. Carr works in the
D. I. L. explosives plant at Nobel.
Harry E. Duckworth, '35, on leave
of absence from the Physics Depart­ment
of the college, returned from
Chicazo for a few days during the
last of March. Mr. Duckworth has
been awarded a Universitv Fellow­ship
at the University of Chicago for
the year 1941-42, where he is study­ing
for his Ph.D. degree in Physics.
W. Frank Baker, '23, manager of
the God's Lake Gold Mines, and Mrs.
Baker (Estelle Mooney, '23). were
visitors in Winnipeg during the last
week in March.
The first Baffinlandian, of which
we have any record, to be born to
United College graduates, is Leslie
Gail Bildfell. He celebrated his
birthday at Pangnirtung, Baffin
Land, N.W.T., on April 4, where his
father, Dr. John A. Bildfell, '26, is in
charge of the mission hospital as
well as justice of the peace, coroner,
and health survey official for the
government. Leslie Gail's mother
was formerly Muriel Meech, '26.
Several issues ago we made an ap­peal
for news about graduates serv­ing
in His Majesty's forces. The re­sponse
has been slow in corning and
the following is therefore far from a
complete list. News of other grad­uates
or undergraduates is still
sought and may be forwarded to A.
D. Longman or A. S. Cummings.
Thomas G. Cottier, '35, is now a
pilot officer with the RC.A.F. and
was recently in Vancouver. Mter
graduation, Tom left Winnipeg for
the Isle of Man. He subsequently
spent two years at the University of
Leeds.
William G. Dodd, of the '38 class,
who recently qualified "with distinc­tion"
for the rank of pilot officer,
called at the College on March 22,
while en route from Saskatoon to
Trenton, where he will take two
months' further .training as an in­structor.
George Thurston, '3~, who enlisted
in the RC.A.F. last fall, recently
spent a few days leave in Winni­pee'.
He was at the Toronto manning
pool most of the winter. was later
transferred to Portave la Prairie and
expects to be posted shortly to the
Head of the Lakes.
William S. Patterson, '38, princi­pal
of the Carman Collegiate, has
recently joined the RC.AF. The
vacancy on the staff is bein-t filled
by Peter S. Buhr, '23, formerly prin­cipal
of the Birtle High SchooL
William A. McKay, '35, RC.A.F.,
who has been stationed at Prince
Albert, also spent a brief leave in
Winnipeg looking up old friends.
Capt. E. Douglas Rathbone, M.D.,
is with the Field Ambulance,
R.C.A.M.C.
Archie G.Greenway, '33, RC.A.F.
Rev. Robert M. Frayne, '24,
RC.AF., chaplain with rank of flight
lieutenant.
Robert Moyse, '40, with Royal
Canadian Navy.
Thomas Shortreed, '40, Gunnery
Section, RC.A.F.
John W. McInnis, '35, Canadian
Army.
Roy M. MacLaren, '35, Canadian
Army.
Gordon M. Steele, '35, RC.A.F.
Desmond O'Brien, '35, R.C.A.F.
Dwight N. Ridd, '20, Canadian
Army.
Capt. Gordon M. Churchill, '21,
Canadian Army.
Albert Mills, '21, RC.A.F.
James MacKelvie, '36, R.C.A.F.
Rev. Earl S. Dixon, '22, Army
chaplain. •
32
Rev. Hugh McFarlane, B.D., RC.
AF., chaplain.
The following undergraduates are
among those in service:
Cameron Mann, '39-'40, radio tech­nician,
RC.A.F.
Campbell A. McKinnon, grade 12,
'40, RC.A.F.
James G. Dyke, in Royal Canadian
Navy.
Murray Dempsey, grade 12, '40,
radio technician, RC.A.F.
Roderick McLennan, grade 12, '41,
RC.A.F.
William Bandeen, '34-'35, RC.A.F.
James Norman Lewis, '4$-'41,
RC.A.F.
John Tucker, '40-'41, RC.A.F.
W. Carleton Ross, '31-'32, R.C.A.F.
Harley Ransom, '26-'27, air mec-hanic,
RC.A.F.
Phillip Dicks Iverson, flying offi­cer,
RC.A.F.
Wilson Marshal Iverson, '31-'32,
RC.A.F.
George Sangster, '31-'32, RC.A.F.
William Sangster, '32-'33, R.C.A.F.
Samuel A. Blakeley, grade 12, '35,
Canadian Army.
Harold Tynte Ross, '39-'40, Cana­dian
Army.
Edward G. Jarjour, '39-'40, dental
corps.
Robert Sales, '33-'34, Canadian
Army.
John Sales, '34-'35, RC.A.F.
A number of United College grad­uates
have been nominated or an­nounced
their intention of accepting
nomination as candidates in the ap­proaching
Manitoba provincial elec­tion.
These include the only woman
member of the last Legislature,Sa­lome
Haldorson, '10 (Social Credit,
St. Georges), the first lady stick of
Wesley College; J. S. Lamond, K.C.,
'Toba, '10 (Lib.-Prog.), renominated
for Iberville; Rev. S. H. Knowles,
'33 (C.C.F.), for Winnipeg; Hon. J.
O. McLenaghen, 'Toba, '14 (minis­ter
6f health and public welfare), for
Selkirk; Mrs. Asta Oddson (Asta
Austmann), Wesley, '17 (Social Cre­dit),
for Winnipeg; Dr. H. O. Mc­Diarmid,
'Toba, '02, Brandon (Lib.­Prog.),
for Brandon. .
Elizabeth F. Morrison, '36, was
called to the Manitoba bar on March
10, 1941. u II
Rev. Richard Ashchoft, a graduate
in theology of Manitoba College of
1909, died in Winnipeg on March 10.
Mr. Ashcroft practised law in Scot­land
before he came to Canada in
1903.
FOR [OmPLETE EnjOymEnT
EnERGIZinG
SATI5FYInG
AnD
DELICIOUS
•
Our College
Is United
'--------------JJ

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Vol. XIV-No.3
APRIL,1941 VOX
NOEL COWARD, THE DRAMATIST
By K. W. McGIRR
PUBLISHED QUARTERLY BY THE UNDERGRADUATES
AND GRADUATES OF UNITED COLLEGE
'FROM MUNICH TO SOFIA
By B. G. SKILLING
At
A
Complete Outfitting
Service for
College-Age Men
and Girls
Everything needed in the way of Apparel and Accessories. With the
emphasis on correct styling ... on serviceability ... on distinction. You
should see the new things now ... when they are new! EATON Prices,
too, are very favorable.
~~T. EATON C~MITED
Every Canadian Student
Should Have These . . .
The Oxford Periodical History of the War
SIX PARTS ALREADY PUBLISHED
Each,! .25c
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NEW ONES BEING PUBLISHED FREQUENTLY
Each •• 10c
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Dominion-Provincial Relations
THREE PARTS
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BOOK DEPARTMENT
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"VOX"
QUARTERLY PUBLICATION OF UNITED COLLEGE UNDERGRADUATES
AND GRADUATES
WINNIPEG MANITOBA
Subscription and Advertising Rates on Application
No.2, Vol. XIV March,1941
THE STAFF
Honorary Editor:
Dr. A. R. M. LOWER
Editor:
M. J. V. SHAVER, B.A. M. J. V. SH.AVER, B. Managing Editor:
HARVEY DRYDEN
Associate Editors:
MARSHALL A. CROWE, DONALDA MCDONALD DONALDA McDO NALD
Business Managers: H. S. CROWE, GEORGE FREEMAN
Art Editor: STEVEN OTTO
Circulation Manager:
DOUGLAS B. SUMNER DOl.7GLAS B. SUMNER
Bulletin Board Editors:
STEFAN BJARNSON, DONNA McRAE
"
Coed Editor: KAY ROWLETTE KAY ROWLET'I'E
CLASS REPRESENTATIVES
Theology-J. ESEK STEWART Third Year-DON PRATT
Fourth Year- H. V. LARUSSON H. V. I,ARUSSON Second year-LORNE GRANGER
First year-STEFAN BJARNSON
Collegiate: ROSEMARY SANDBERG, SELMA JOHNSON, HELEN PRATT,
DALE MIDDLER
ALUMNI STAFF
FJditol': ALBERT M. BRIGGS, '36.
CONTENTS
ARTICLES
Page
EDITORIAL ·__.__ _.."._._ L ,:: ~'. : : DONALDA McDONALD .__ _. 2
A GRAND DUEL._ c _ , .. _ __ ..DOUGLASS TUNSTELL __ "'.'_.. 23
EUTERPE AMERICA . :. ; ALBERTA SHEARER :.:.... 13
FROM MUNICH TO SOFIA __._ ;..__ __ H. G. SKILLING .. . __16
MISCHA ELMAN ...__.....__. :_.__ __..__..ENID VIVIAN NEMY ._............ 31
NOEL COWARD, THE DRAMATIST ~ __ K. W. McGIRR . _. 4
TOMORROW BEGINS TODAY ._ __ __ A. V. PIGOTT __ _ _.. 3
SHORT STORIES
OH CANADA __ ~ _ MARGARET BARAGER ::.._ 28
THE LETTER .__.;.:.;..: :_:.:: ..".:.'.•....:.L:. MARJORIE PECK ~ : __ 21
POETRY
ALLEGORY _c __ : ANNE PHELPS __., ,.. 9
PERHAPS' . .__ .__ ce.• :_.,..: } '.
~O%~~~~~~..~~.~..~_~~~~::::::::::::~::::::::: DONNA McRAE . _ 24-30
ALUMNI NOTES ----.. ··..··_···..-.._·..:..···..{.7:~~...:~-.~,;:~':1:'---··-..::.-·_··_······~-t~ ..·• _· ··~~·_...·~.._.;,··.._-r:··..~''..···_···· ..- __ • 24
1
EDITORIAL By Donalda B. McDonald
Slamming the "Stage Door" Slamming ENERGY is the most precious possession of a student. He translates this
energy into activity; but, quite frequently, that activity is like a ride on
the merry-go-round. The student may get a brass ring with a buffalo
on it; but, more often, he gets off feeling dizzy, ending his year "not with a
bang but a whimper."
I blame the student himself for this stupid state of affairs. Too many of us
are too ready to leap on one of the wooden horses with glittering brass poles
without considering whether it is worthwhile wasting our energy in the leap
and the subsequent hanging on.
The curriculum of a general arts course, in particular, is not a treadmill.
The time-table of twenty hours per week in junior division and sixteen hours
per week in senior division of formal lectures is a very mild attendance
requirement. If we assume that every student stays "awake" or at least out of
bed, for sixteen hours per day, that means that he has about eight hours of
time exclusive of formal classes and meals in which he is a free lance artist,
If we deduct another four hours per day for intensive individual "study" he
still has four hours for that particular brand of "living" which most students
consider is the prime object in coming to college. And so it is. But when I
think that those four hours of "living" have a peculiar habit of stretching
through the whole day, I sometimes wonder why we choose to expend our
precious energy in that stretching.
What do we do? Oh, yes--extra curricular activities. The student news­paper,
magazine, Glee Club, Debating Club, athletics are the finest occupations
in the world for that precious four hours of "living" provided that these
organizations are living' up to their names. We are blessed with a Public
Relations Committee who sees to it that this is the case as far as the public is
concerned.
But, after the public has been taken care of, there is no one to protect the
student from himself. Professors are very tactful in student activities; but
quite often students are a little too spirited to get the point in that tact. In that
spiritedness the student rushes into something without considering the end.
MY PARTICULAR point of attack is on the major productions of the
1 Dramatic Society of our University for the last four years, as these are
the best known to me. We have just as fine a crop of amateur talent as any
other Canadian University-actors, stage crews, wardrobe mistresses, make-up
experts. We have members· of the faculties who are specialists in any aspect
of drama from a voice inflection to the careful draping of a set of curtains.
In such informal affairs as the annual One-Act Play Festival the work of
these people, both students, professors and professional guides, shines. But, in
the major productions of the year, a full length play, all this fine effort is
"wasted on second-rate material, /especially this year's offering.
I realize how much work went into that little opus. But I contend that it
was one of the finest displays of wasted effort it has ever been my privilege
to try to applaud, if not for the achievement, at least for the effort. .
(Continued on Page 29)
TOMORROW
begins
TODAY
By A. V. PIGOTT '20 By A. V. PIG 0 T T '2 0
r-"f~"'3WENTY-THREE centuries ago Plato
said, "Most of the social and political
Le:~~ ills from which you suffer are under
your control, given only the will and courage
to change them. You can live in another and a
wiser fashion if you choose to think it out and
work for it."
Today in our chaotic world I think we still
believe our old Greek mentor. But we are too
busy exculpating ourselves and blaming others,
both in times of peace and war, to get 'down to
business and avoid the pitfalls ahead.
How much we have said and written al­ready
about the cause of the present war! It
comes from personal ambitions, personal wick­edness,
personal greed in the people of the
world. "Ah!" says the socialist, "those are at-
. tributes of the capitalist."
The French show the bloodthirsty German's
place in starting many recent wars; the Ger­mans
point with passion to the aggressive Eng­lish.
We shall blame Hitler, and he, in turn,
will hurl invective at the head of the im­perturbable
Churchill.
Back of all the clamour, however, lie the
real causes of our ills-Science and Invention.
These masters of our Age have created a new
world of steel and iron, of physics and chemis­try;
They have amplified our power, increased
our knowledge, and have given us more free­dom
from toil and drudgery than any genera­tion
the world has seen. But they were given
to us by a few minds--a few courageous lead­ers
who paid no attention to the fact that the
human mind is very slow and'extremely lazy.
It has always dragged a century or so behind
clinging to the tail of progress and hollering,
"Whoa!" Mr. Nobody uses all these modern
gadgets for living, handles dangerous machines,
controls great) powers, but philosophically and
3
A. V. PIGOTT
socially he is at home only with the thoughts
of the sixteenth century.
It is always so. Old moral and political
codes hold us long after the world for which
they were made have passed on. It was so dur­ing
the Middle Ages. Men went forward for
centuries while gazing lovingly. backward to
the Golden Age of Rome. Surely the good old
days would come again. Perhaps a Holy Roman
Empire could do the trick. But it didn't. New
leaders arose and created the good new days of
the Renascence and once again mankind faced
the future for a while.
A century from now historians will prob­ably
amuse the people of that day with the
amazing story of our frightful nationalistic
struggles, while, in the laboratories of the
world, great secrets of power were being
wrested from nature. Secrets that had in them
all the potentialities of a brave new world.
They will tell how, in one generation of
time and space, new products, factories, raw
materials and their markets knit the world into
a great international business complex. The
Democracies were the leaders in this and their
success was built on freedom and industry.
Peace became a necessity and war an ana­chronism.
OTHER states did not fare so well. To hold
up their structure, discipline and arma­ment
worked best. Peace was dangerous; race
hatred and war seemed to be necessary.
In the Democracies freedom had run roit;
and business led to an insidious stratification of
(Continued on Page 26)
Clr""_!llI!'IRIVATE LIVES" the best comedy
written by Noel Coward, marks simul­taneously
the climax and crisis of his
career up until now. It is the climax because it
brings to perfection the type of comedy which
he writes so well and it is the crisis because it
shows that he has achieved great heights in
this type of comedy, but if he is to progress and
be ranked among the world's foremost dramat­ists
he must inculcate into his style- and situa­tions
something of a broader}~ and richer
character.
The scene for "Private Lives" is laid in a
fashionable and expensive hotel. The people
are smooth and sophisticated, giving a brief
glimpse of the kind of top hat and sequin so­ciety
which dangles a cocktail glass in one hand
and divorce in the other-the kind of people
and society with which Noel Coward is in­variably
associated. The sleek, blase, sophisti­cation,
portrayed in lightning-paced, hard, rat­tling,.
farcial comedy situations and lives at
which he aimed so many trial shots is brought
to perfection here. Fleeting glimpses of it are
in his earlier plays-in the first two acts of
"The Vortex" and scattered here and there
throughout "Hay Fever"-but "Private Lives"
constitutes a resume of all his former attempts
and brings his efforts at this type of comedy to
a brilliant zenith.
"Private Lives" is the story of a husband
and wife, Elyot and Mandy, who have just
been divorced. The play opens with them both
embarking on a second honeymoon at the same
hotel, each ignorant of the presence of the
other. As their rooms open on to adjoining
balconies it is inevitable that they should meet,
which they do after being mutually irritated
by their new better halves. The result is that
they discover that they are still in love and
rush back to Paris-on the first night of their
second honeymoon and resume existence at
their old apartment, leaving their latest attach­ments
to find them as best they can.
As Elyot's and Amanda's divorce had been
brought about, not from lack of love, but be­cause
of their constant bickering, they make an
agreement to· shout "Solomon Isaacs" when­ever
they feel a quarrel coming on. This work­ed
very well for a while, but eventually they
end up in a beautiful brawl, rolling on the floor,
biting and kicking each other. In the midst of
4
NOEL COWARD NOEL THE DRA this quiet little interlude, who should walk in
but Sybil and Victor, the erstwhile honey­mooners.
Their conventional horror at the situation,
and their smugness at not being part of it, is
sublime. The conclusion of the play is even
merrier. In the general discussion which fol­lows
about what is to be done, Amanda and
Elyot gradually come together again while
Sybil and Victor, hitherto quite friendly in
their mutual loss, begin to find fault with each
other instead of with Amanda and Elyot as
formerly'. Consequently, the scene ends with
Amanda and Elyot slipping quietly off, hand in
hand, very much in love, while Sybil and Vic­tor
are in the midst of the same type of vulgar
brawl as that which they had previously
descried.
The play was hailed by the papers as ten­uous,
thin, brittle, gossamer, irridescent, and
delightfully daring, which added up in the
public mind to cocktails, evening dress, re­partee,
and a dash of wickedness, thus making
the play an immediate success from the box
office point of view.
It was written when Coward was in Shang­hai
recuperating from a bout of influenza which
had struck him on the trip he was taking to
recuperate from his strenuous work previously
-the failure of "Sirocco" and the success of
"Bittersweet."
Apparently when leaving on his trip he had
promised Gertrude. Lawrence that he would
write a play for her. The idea for "Private
Lives" struck him in Tokyo but he did not
write it at once. "Hay Fever" five years pre­viously,
had been written in three days, but
benefitting by experience he determined to
write "Private Lives" at his leisure. The op­portunity
came with Shanghai and influenza
and he completed a rough draft of the play,
which he polished up later in Hong Kong. Con­sidering
how, when and where it was written,
A.
I
1
(
II
~BD
E Dramatist D
ten­and
the
, re-
~king
~ box
had
ould
ivate
not
pre­,
but
d to
e op-enza
play,
Con­itten,
By Kay W. McGirr
AMilTI·ST
I can only marvel that he did not bring in at
least a Chinese butler; however, no trace of the
Orient is discernible.
On the whole, the play was a great suc­cess.
'this was remarkable because it is ex­ceedingly
difficult to act. The brittle dialogue,
usually between two characters only, is difficult
to sustain despite its many laugh lines and
comic situations. These are packed through­out
the play and; are the best yet written by
Coward. Although the lines in his earlier plays
are witty and amusing, they lack the brilliant
force and subtlety displayed in situations such
as the following:
Elyot: If there's one thing in the world that in­furiates
me it is sheer wanton stubbornness. I
should like to cut your head off with a meat axe.
Sybil: How dare you talk to me like that on our
honeymoon nighti
Elyot: Damn our honeymoon night. Damn it,
damn it, damn it!
Sybil (bursting into tears): Oh, Elli, Elli-­Elyot:
Stop crying. Will you or will you not
~ come away with me to Paris?
Sybil: I've never been so miserable in my life.
You're hateful and beastly. Mother was perfectly
right. She said you had shifty eyes.
Elyot: Well, she can't talk. Her's are so close
together you couldn't put a needle between them.
The same humor occurs in the following
discussion between Amanda and Elyot in their
flat when they are hiding in Paris from their
new co-partners in Honeymoons a la Mode:
Elyot: I suppose one or other of them will turn
up here eventually.
Amanda: Bound to; it won't be very nice, will
it?
Elyot (cheerfully): Perfectly horrible.
Amanda: "Do you realize we're living in sin?
Elyot: Not according to the Catholics. Catholics
don't recognize divorce. We're married as much as
we ever were.
Amanda: Yes, dear, but we're not Catholics.
Elyot: Never mind, it's nice to think they sort of
back us up. We were married in the eyes of Heaven
and we still are.
5
Amanda: We may be all right in the eyes of
Heaven but we look like being in a hell of a mess
socially.
And a sure-fire laugh line occurs with Elyot
exclaiming prudishly in a fit of jealousy, "It
doesn't suit women to be promiscuous" while
Amanda retorts, "It doesn't suit men for women
to be promiscuous."
Slightly less subtle but equally effective is
the following passage beginning with Amanda
exclaiming loftily, "I've been brought up to
believe that it's beyond the pale for a man to
strike a woman."
Elyot: A very poor tradition. Certain women
should be struck regularly like gongs.
Amanda: You're an unmitigated cad and a bully.
Elyot: And you're an ill-mannered, bad-temp­ered
slattern.
Amanda (loudly): Slattern, indeed.
Elyot: Yes, slattern, slattern, slattern and fish­wife.
Victor: Keep your mouth shut, you swine.
Elyot: Mind your own damned business.
The method employed in this last passage
is the most common one in comedy, that of in­vective
and abuse. Nevertheless, these bits are
scattered among parts of a more subtle nature
so that the result is a brilliant and witty and
convicing comedy.
BUT despite these obvious devices there
seems to be an attempt by Coward at intri­cate
plot structure. Instead of having his plot
rising in jagged peaks to a climax, there is a
definite attempt at something more difficult in
the line of a figure resembling an hour glass.
Prior to the opening of the play, Elyot and
Amanda are each on the tip of the glass. When
the play opens we are plunged in media res,
into the midst of complications where they are
separated. This is the straight part of the.glass,
However, these complications gradually extend
out to where they were at the beginning, with
Amanda and Elyot once more reconciled and
on the extreme tip of the glass.
This same sort of arrangement manifests
itself perhaps more clearly, although inversely,
in a brief one-act play entitled, "We Were
Dancing." When the scene opens Louise and
Karl' are dancing. They are total strangers.
Suddenly a kind of enchantment sweeps over
them and they are madly in love. They tell
Hubert, Louise's husband, at once. He is very
understanding and sympathetic and stays with
them until dawn, threshing the whole situation
out. Then, when it is settled that Louise will
go off on a trip with Karl immediately he
leaves, Karl looks at Louise, takes her in his
arms, they dance and then Karl remarks, "Of
course, the music makes a difference" and
Louise, "Moonlight doesn't last." They kiss
each other, the magic is gone, and there is
nothing left.
In the beginning of the play, Louise and
Hubert are apparently happily married when
Karl enters the scene and he and Louise fall
so madly in love with each other. Then after
the ensuing complications the pattern is in its
original state with Louise back with Hubert.
Thus there seems to be a sort of deliberate
structure behind Coward's plays, no matter
how loosely they seem to be hung together on
the surface. He has an excellent, intuitive
sense of writing which is probably the result of
this wide and varied experiences with the
theatre. From his earliest years he was school­ed
in all the arts of the theatre, singing, danc­ing
and acting, so that it is no wonder that to­day
he is an actor, and dancer, an author of
plays, and lyrics, and a composer of music.
He first showed his inclinations along this
line at the age of four, when he was taken to
church and during the first hymn proceeded to
dance in the aisle. Upon being told that this
was not the thing to do, he sobbed violently :
and had to be taken home. Thus his first ap­pearance
in public was hardly what might be
called a success.
At six, however, he overcame this unfavor­able
beginning by being a tremendous success
at a children's concert where he sang and
accompanied himself on the piano.
At .seven he had progressed so far that he
had worked out a dance routine.
Two years later he wrote a tragedy and
forced the neighboring girls to act in it. When
they giggled and refused to treat his great work
with the high seriousness which he felt it de­served,
he bashed one of them over the head
with a wooden spade. This first play was - c
doomed to failure because the spade episode
apparently aroused international complications
in the form of a flock of angry mothers.
When he was ten the family fortunes reach­ed
a new state of collapse and his mother took
in roomers. His attendance at school had al-
6
ways been unwilling and poor and now it
practically ceased altogether. He was given a
chance to act in "The Great Name" with
Charles Hautry, and so became aprofessional
actor.
After this he was in a considerable number
of plays although not employed constantly.
Three years later, however, he was engaged
with the Liverpool Repertory Company, where
his life-long friendship with Gertrude Law­rence
began. He refers in "Present Indicative"
to her as "a viv.acious child with ringlets to
whom I took an instant fancy."
In 1918 his career as an actor was abruptly
curtailed for his brief and inglorious existence
in the British army. Owing to bad headaches,
brought on by an acute dislike of the Atrrny and
poor physical condition, he was soon sent to a
hospital where to his horror he was placed in
an epileptic ward. Eventually a doctor was
found who understood the nature of his dis­order
and he was placed under treatment,
cured, and discharged with a six months' pen­sion
to his infinite relief.
After this brief and loathsome interval, he
returned to his life as an actor and by the end
of the year had definitely established the
theatre as his world, having done considerable
acting, written several plays and in addition to
these composed some verse, lyrics, a novel and
short stories.
His verse and lyrics while reasonably good
and popular in demand have never achieved
the fame that his plays have. A few of them,
for example, "I'll See You Again" from "Bitter­sweet"
are definitely catchy and have good
rhythm but lack that certain something neces­sary
for lasting quality. His best work has
undoubtedly been done in the field of drama
and it is in this sphere that his greatest chances
for future fame rest, and it is the purpose of
this article - to discuss mainly his merits as a
dramatist.
Although when he was twenty he succeeded
in selling a play for $2,000, it was never pro­duced,
and it was not until five years later
when "The Vortex" was produced that his first
smash hit occurred. The customary trials and
tribulations which invariably occur in the
production of a play seemed even morse than
usual in connection with "The Vortex." Every­thing
that could possibly happen in the way of
bad luck happened with a vengeful tury. De­spite
the bad omens, the play was a huge suc­cess.
Coward himself acted the heavy part of
Nicky, and although he no doubt turned in a
very creditable performance, the play itself re­ceivedmore
plaudits than his acting in it.
The plot of "The Vortex" deals with a beau­tiful
woman, Florence, who has had innumer­able
love affairs since her marriage, and her
son, Nicky, who becomes a drug addict.
The first act takes place in Florence's town
home where she is surrounded by noise, cock­tails,
gaiety and friends, chief of whom is Tom
Veryan, a dumb, handsome beast, and her lat­est
lover. Nicky, who has been studying
abroad, returns, bringing with him his fiancee,
Bunty Mainwaring, a blunt, normal sort of girl,
who it seems is an old friend of Tom's. At a
house party which Florence gives the next
week everyone's nerves become frayed and
Bunty and Tom decide they have more in
common with each other than with Florence
and Nicky, whereupon Bunty breaks her en­gagement.
Florence, upon catching Tom and
Bunty in a clinch, gives way to an uncontroll­able
emotion and Nicky for the first time sees
her as a she really is-a cheapened old woman.
A terrific scene then ensues between Florence
and Nicky in which Nicky forces a confession
from Florence that Tom has not been her first
lover and in turn discloses his drug habit. The
play ends with tears all over the place and
mother and son clasped in each other's arms.
The first two acts display Coward's mastery
of dialogue and ability to give a vivid sense of
bored, hectic society, both trends which later
reached their peak of perfection in "Private
Lives." The dialogue is sharp and scintillating,
abounding in humorous touches. However, the
tempo changes abruptly with the third act. The
play loses its air of detached, blase sophistica­tion
and suddenly becomes desperately sincere
and earnest. D~perately so, because Coward
loses llimself in it in his earnestness and the
result is that it is overdrawn and strained and
Nicky is unnaturally brutal to his mother when,
for instance, he exclaims during the tense in­timate
sc~ne in Florence's bedroom, "You're
not young or beautiful; I'm seeing for the first
time how old you are. It's horrible-your silly
fair hair - and your face all plastered and
painted--."
7
HOWEVER, despite its faults, the scene is
real and compelling, with vital moments
such as this one.
Despite Coward's youth when he wrote it,
the play shows a remarkable knowledge of
stage technique in the first two acts, where a
glimpse of his future greatness as a master of
dialogue is seen.' In the last act, too, may be
seen a certain potentiality, which when toned
down and ironed out, would reveal the author
not only a master of dialogue but of powerful
situations as well.
As it is, the play although good is too apt
to slip from the hands of the actors. An ex­ample
of this occurred in Chicago when Noel
Coward was making an American tour with the
play. Instead of pathos and tears at the end of
the play, something failed to click and the
audience was smitten with laughter at the be­ginning
of the third act until, at the end, people
were practically rolling in the aisles.
The characters are clear and well drawn
and on the whole the play, although not re­markable,
shows good entertainment value and
is a remarkable achievement when the youth
and experience of Coward at that time are
taken into consideration.
It is not a great play but is a series of short
sketches, perfect in themselves. One of these
occurs at the end of Act II, when you have the
son frantically playing the piano while the
mother cheapens herself and whimpers for her
lover. And'again in Act III the portion of the
play where the mother and son go to the win­dow
is a little entity in itself. Therefore, al­though
"The Vortex" is a weak play it is re­deemed
by its supple, idiomatic dialogue and
thumb-nail sketches set here and there and
beautifully achieved.
Another play written during this early
period of his life, and which he dashed off in
three days flat, is "Hay Fever." The characters
for this play were taken from life and varied
to suit his own purposes.
Apparently he stayed with a family of Scotts
while visiting G. B. Stern for a few weeks, and
they were utterly rude to him most of the
time. He describes Mrs. D. Scott in definite
and unflattering terms in "Present Indicative."
However, it is from this woman that the gay,
blithe, entrancing Judith Bliss of "Hay Fever"
is drawn. Before I go into raptures over Judith,
as I invariably will sooner or later, a brief
sketch of the plot is necessary.
The situation is a week-end party at Cook­ham
at the villa of Mr. and Mrs. Bliss and their
grown-up son and daughter, Simon and Sorel.
They have each, without telling anyone, asked
a guest for the week-end. Judith (Mrs. Bliss)
has asked Sandy Tynell, a strapping Greek
god, a bit on the dumb side but very hand­some.
Mr. Bliss, a second-rate novelist, has
invited Miss Jackie Coryton, a cheap flapper,
presumably to "study" her for his latest
creation, "The Sinful Woman." Simon Bliss,
the son, has asked Myra Arundel, a siren widow
to whom he has lightly taken a passionate
fancy. Sorel Bliss, in reaction to the Bohem­ianism
of her family, has told a diplomat, Rich­ard
Greatham, of mature years, to come for the
week-end.
Each member of the family neglects to tell
the others of his plans and emotional complica­tions
result. The villa is small (one guest has
the Japanese room, another Little Hell, and we
never do find out where the other two sleep),
one of the two servants is ill and provisions are
anything but plentiful. Each guest has been
given to understand that he is to be the only
one and each has looked forward to a little
private flirtation. The family add to the com­plications
by their incorrigible habit of drama­tizing
everything.
Judith, it seems, is an actress and though
she has retired innumerable times she inevit­ably
returns to the stage. But whether on it or
not, she acts all the time 'and the family feel
bound to play up to her. They are casual, care­less,
proud of themselves and each other, but
they ar.e always at their very best when with
Judith. Her vital enthusiasm and supreme
nonchalant, unknowing disregard for every­t.
hing and everybody sweeps up and carries
along the entire family. As a family they have
a marvellous time together as the following
scene shows, when Judith announces that she
intends to revive h~r famous play, "L~ve's
Whirlwind."
The mere suggestion of "Love's Whirlwind"
is enough to set the family Joff and they all drop
automatically into parts as Judith speaks the
opening line, "Is this a game?" Simon and
Sorel play up to her beautifully and for a few
moments we feel completely crazy with the
mad Bliss family. Later on "Love's Whirlwind"
8
really comes into its own at the end of Act II,
where one of the guests enters a room in the
house where everyone is assembled and un­suspectingly,
because of all the noise, asks what
is going on and says the fatal words, "Is this a
game?" to which Judith replies, "Yes, and a
game that must be played to the finish." Simon
grasps the situation immediately and cries,
"Zana, what does this mean7" At this point,
David Bliss, the father, realizes what is going
on and collapses on the sofa, muttering in a
hysterical aside, "Love's Whirlwind! Dear old
Love's Whirlwind." But Judith, Simon and
Sorel play out the scene to the end, while their
guests look on in dazed horror.
Situations like this one and the one which
concludes the play, where the family sit around
the breakfast table arguing over a trivial point
in the now completed "Sinful Woman" while
their guests slip quietly off, unnoticed and un­wanted,
make the playa' laughable riot from
start to finish.
Comic situations, excellent characterization
(Judith) and a natural, witty dialogue com­bine
to make "Hay Fever" one of the funniest
and most enjoyable plays I have ever read.
Following the success of "The Vortex" and
"Hay Fever" Coward suffered a series of fail­ures,
which was climaxed by "Sirrocco." And
so the first phase of his career, which had be­gun
with so much bright promise, closed in
doubt and despair.
However, no one as versatile as Coward
could remain under a cloud for long, and soon
he was back in public favor with "Bittersweet"
and "Cavalcade." Coward, himself, in speak­ing
of "Bittersweet" said that as a whole it
gave him more complete satisfaction than any­thing
else which he had written because it
achieved and sustained the original mood of
its conception more satisfactorily than a great
deal of his other works and partially because
its mood of semi-nostalgic seitiment appealed
to him.
I, myself, saw "Bittersweet" performed on
the-screen some eight-odd years ago. As at that
time I was in the throes of young love and con­sequently
more interested in the boyan my
right than the hero on the screen, all I can re­member
is that I was profoundly bored, im­patient,
and anxious to leave, incurring at that
time a violent dislike for Noel Coward. This
(Continued on Page 10) _
v Allegory 1llegory
1'1
--...----....: .-.-
9
By Ann Phelps diffusing
of gray­rang
already on
d to ring on dead
arms took
Noel Coward, Dramatist Noel Coward, Dramatist
(Continued from Page 8)
opinion did not change until.two years ago,
when it vanished like most of my previous
ideas.
My latest experience with the play, "Bitter­sweet"
done up in typical Nelson Eddy and
Jeannette MacDonald style, was very lovely
and impressive, but not, definitely not, Noel
Coward's play.
I am not going to attempt to ruin "Bitter­sweet"
for anyone by giving one of my fascin­ating
little sketches of it. All I can say is that
there is an intangible something in it which
appeals profoundly to most of us and lingers
like the scent of pressed roses, the scent of
beautiful things, loved and gone.
My feelings toward "Cavalcade" are mixed.
On the one hand, as I dislike sagas intensely, I
want to condemn it as a superficially starring
production, actually not a good drama and
perhaps a little cheap in spirit with its "Rule
Britannia and "We-don't-want-to-fight-but-by­Jingo-
if-we-do" ideas. ON THE other hand, I cannot deny that there
is a certain richness and tenderness about
the scene on the Titanic when we are given a
glimpse of Edith and Edward, so full of life .
and looking forward to everything so much
and the supreme significance of the moment
when Edith removes her cloak from the rail
and discloses the· white life belt with S.S.
Titanic in black upon it.
Then again, apart from merely singing the
glories of the British Empire it does convey a
sense of a spectacle of a civilization that came
and went-the destroying of old values and
the gradual building of the new, in all their
vulgarity and crudity. This last is typified in
Ellen, the maid ,who had changed from a
quiet, respectful servant to a loud, "I'm just as
good as you" distinctly middle-class woman.
"Cavalcade" was a huge success and was
greeted enthusiastically by both England and
America. One of the most thrilling parts of
Coward's autobiography, "Present Indicative"
is when he tells his thrill of seeing the Royal
Family at "Cavalcade."
After the brilliant success of both "Caval­cade"
and "Bittersweet" Noel Coward return­ed
once more to public gaze as a dramatist.
Benefiting from his failures in this line, he
tightened his plots and concentrated not only
10
on witty lines but on situations as well. "De­sign
for Living" and "Private Lives" resulted in
all their scintillating glory.
However, there is something more to
Coward than just brilliant musical productions
and comedies. There is another side of him
mainly shown in his plays, which have not
been quite so successful.
The idea of what is moral and what is not
seems to be constantly in his mind. Illicit love
affairs occur again and again as the theme of
his plays. He seems to be groping after a
standard of· values and like Aristotle seems
to think value a relative thing, i.e., right or
truth is not something fixed but is relative to
the situation to which it appertains. There­fore,
Linda, Leo and Otto, who live together
in such glorious unmarried bliss in "Design
for Living" should not be scorned as moral'
degenerates from our rigid moral standards
because actually they are virtuous when judg­ed
in connection with another set.
. Often, too, he shows that the infidelity of a
wife or husband is due to some unpredictable
event. If they fall in love it is not because they
want to but because some kind of spell has
been cast over them and they are swept away
before they can realize what is happening.
Sometimes they are freed from the trend by
supreme will power and at others they never
escape. In "The Astonished Heart" Chris
manages to free himself but he only does so by
death.
Barbara and Chris are stagnating in com­fortable
married life until suddenly Lenora
Vail, Barbara's old school chum, appears on
the scene. She is beautiful and starts a flirta­tion
with Chris to cure her insatiable appetite
for intrigue and romance. Unfortunately, she
tires of Chris before he does of her and in
bitter disillusionment at her fickleness he hurls
himself from a window. The play ends ironic­ally
with Chris dying in Lenora's arms crying,
"Babs, I'm not submerged any more, Babs."
In "We Were Dancing (the plot sketch was
given previously) the lovers were disillusioned
immediately and mutually and the tragedy lay
in the loss of the enchanting what might have
been.
In "The Astonished Heart" one member of
the intrigue tires before the other, with the
result that for a moment Chris is almost free
of the spell. He gropes desperately for the
answer ana In a final surge of despair at the
futility of it all, cries at Lenora, "It isn't your
fault. I don't believe it's even mine-it's an
act of God, darling, like fire and wind and
pestilence. You're in on a grand tragedy, the
best tragedy of all, and the best joke, the
triumphant, inevitable defeat of mind by mat­ter
. . . Get up and go-it doesn't matter any
more to me whether you're here or in the
moon. Get up and go-"
The disillusionment of Chris is complete.
The inevitability. of it all has burst upon him.
Naturally he jumps out a window and as he
dces so the last bonds break so that he is able
to escape and exclaim at last, "I'm not sub­merged
anymore."
"Still Life" is a further variation of this
conflict of a man and a woman with forces
which seem beyond their control. In this case
neither tires of the situation, but both are mar­ried
and have children, and because of this
agree to separate. The entire action takes place
in the refreshment room of a station where
they have their first accidental meeting. They
meet here weekly until they eventually fall in
love and become lovers, meeting secretly in
the house of a friend of Alec's. Unfortunately,
the friend returns unexpectedly one night and
although he probably doesn't know of Laura's
presence, nevertheless, she feels cheapened and
sees that the affair must end. She meets him
for the last time at the station. But they are
even cheated of a last farewell as a friend of
Laura's finds them and sticks like glue. Alec
is forced to say goodbye, casually, and leave-:­forever.
A few moments later an express is
due. Laura walks out to meet it. calmly, but
at the last minute her courage fails her and
she returns white and shaken.
IF THE aim of a tragedy is to produce cath-arsis
it certainly succeeds here. We pity
Laura-the cheapening discovery of what was
to her a magical moment, her return to a hum­drum
life and the way in which she was
thwarted of a last farewell, and the failure of
her courage when she was about to throw
herself beneath the express train. But we feel
fear too. A fear that there are these forces out­side
us, inevitable and ruthless, waiting silently
for a chance to pounce and destroy the puny
lives within their grasp.
It. is this problem, namely the fact that
people are so often caught up in an inevitable
trend of circumstances pre-arranged for them,
that seems to fascinate Coward. It reoccurs
again and again throughout his work, now in
one form, now in another. He turns it over and
over seeking a solution but never seems to
find one.
He attempts to define it in "We Were
Dancing" when Louise exclaims, "This thing
is here-now-between Karl and me. It's no
use pretending it isn't,or trying to flip it away
as a joke, nor is it any use taking up a belli­gerent
attitude over it. God knows I'm con-
. fused enough myself, utterly bewildered, but
I do know that it's real, too real to be dissi­pated
by conventional gestures." And then
Karl says, "I know that suddenly, when we
were dancing, an enchantment swept over me.
An enchantment that I have never known
before and shall never know again."
It appears again in "The Astonished Heart"
when Barbara, the wife, accepts her husband's.
confession, calmly saying, "You said just now
you were submerged-that's true you are;
you've crushed even your· emotions for years
and now you're paying for it. It's nothing to
be ashamed of, with your sort of temperament
it was inevitable. It had to happen. I've been
waiting for it."
And Chris, in torture, replies, "Suddenly
I felt myself being swept away and I started
to struggle, but the. tide was stronger than I
knew and now I'm far from the land, darling­far
from my life and you and safety-I'm
struggling still, but the water is terribly deep
and I'm frightened-I'm frightened. It isn't
Lenora, it's nothing to do with Lenora any
more; it's the thing itself-her face and her
body and her charm make a frame, but the
picture's in me, before my eyes constantly, and
I can't get it out.
It occurs again in "Point Valaine" when
Martin says, "I'm a little frightened. Perhaps
it is the strangeness of the thing that is scaring
us both, the suddenness of finding out how we
feel about each other. It's like sort of a dream
to me, it has been ever since I arrived."
In addition to this preoccupation with
values and toying with fate, a distinct satiric
trend is noticeable in Coward. He apparently
took a long time to recover from the bitter
disillusionment of the war. His earlier plays
take off beautifully the bright shallow crea­tures
who appeared after the war. An example
of this is in the first two acts of "The Vortex"
11
and also in "Hands Across the Sea" where the
people are only hollow shells.
One of the most significant speeches I ran
across in connection with this was that of Zoe
in "This Was a Man." She has been away and
on her return feels lost and out of touch. She
says in a fit of disillusionment:
"Futile! I return after a year's oblivion,
thrilled and excited, longing to see myoId
friends, and what do I find? Clacking, shallow,
nonentities, doing the same things; saying the
same things, thinking the same things. They're.
stale! They seem to have lost all wit and charm
and restraint-or perhaps they never had any."
His disgust with the times is further ex­pressed
by this speech, "I loathe this age and
everything to do with it. All the red-blooded,
honest-to-God emotions have been squeezed
out of us. We're incapable of hating enough
or loving enough. When any big moment comes
along, good or bad, we hedge around it, argu­ing
it, weighing it, in the balance of reason and
psychology, trying to readjust values until
there's nothing left and nothing achieved."
Like most men he cannot resist a dig or so
at women and has Quinn in "Point Valaine"
state, "I think I despise most their lack of emo­tional
balance" and later, "I also dislike their
fundamental dishonesty."
However, perhaps he pleads for our under­standing
in this next speech of Quinn's. "You
see, I always affect to despise human nature.
My role in life is so clearly marked cynical,
detached, unscrupulous, an ironic observer and
recorder of other people's passions. Perhaps
. I am misunderstood. Perhaps I have suffered
a great deal and am really a very loving spirit."
At any rate, whether he meant it or not,
there is a very definite cynical detachment
running throughout his plays. He shows up the
class consciousness and the artificiality of the
bourgeois morality, but there is something more
in it than this.
Although his people are set in this frame­work
of bourgeois morality; he is not always
sneering at their superficialness. Rather, it
seems to me in many of his plays that he
contrasts two sets of values. What Glenda,
Otto and Leo do is all right in their world of
values but not in ours, and this seems to be a
sly little dig at our smug lines of good and
bad. We are horrified about people who have
affairs and talk of them in hushed tones, never
thinking that perhaps in another light they
12
are just as moral as we are. Coward seems to
be in revolt (a subtle one, though) at a form
of society which draws rigid lines of right and
wrong with no place for things in between or
for exceptions.
He shows us what happens when people
are forced to work out their lives in the man­ner
dictated by the Victorian age. Sometimes
it results in howling comedy, such as in "Pri­vate
Lives" and "Design for Living" and again
in results in the tender, heart-searching pathos
of "Still Life."
Despite the fact that he nonchalantly states
in the introduction to "Play Parade" that peo­ple
persist in reading far too much into his
plays, nevertheless the stuff, whether he in­tended
it or not, is there. .
He may have written certain plays with his
tongue in his cheek for the pure monetary re­turn
they would yield him. He may be writing
plays from the standpoint of "Aha! This will
get 'em." But I defy anyone to belittle the real
earnestness and sincerity displayed in "The
Vortex" "The Astonished Heart" "Still Life"
and similar works. There is contained in these
plays a deep understanding of human nature,
its perplexities and inevitable way in which our
lives are complicated and controlled. If, in the
working out of them his style fails to reach the
height of excellency attained by his ideals, we
must remember his youthful years and give
him the benefit of immaturity.
He has attained an unusually high standard
of excellence in his line of comedy. No matter
why, when, or how, they were written, they
are excellent for their entertainment value and
the sheer comedy of the lines, theme, char­acters
and situations. I feel that he has reached
his peak in this line of creation and that if he
is to show further progress he must dip back
into plays like "The Vortex" and play up their
sincere earnestness, put forward his theory of
relative values and smash our smug puritanism,
but do it much more artfully and forcefully
than before.
I feel that he has reached the turning point
of his career. It lies in his hands to make him­self
a writer of successful, witty, amusing
comedies which mayor may not prove of last­ing
nature, or to become a writer of drama,
deep, powerful, searching, universal not only in
its own age but true for succeeding generations
-unafraid to speak its ideals in the face of
convention.
f;i~~~HE obvious things about American
music are first, that there is little of
~""""'~l:.Iill real significance, and second, that most
of this little was written roughly after 1880.
It is not difficult to understand why this should
be so.
The first settlers in America were almost
exclusively English, and in view of the high
position occupied by England in the musical
world in the early 17th century, it has seemed
reasonable to wonder why there was so little
musical activity among the transplanted Eng­lish.
It is comparatively easy to criticize the
Puritans, and the result has been, of course,
that they have been made responsible for most
of the more depressing features of American
life. But it is neither fair nor correct to explain
the dearth of musical activity in young Amer-conditions
under which the early settlers lived.
The frontier-beloved of the history depart­ment-
has influenced American art no less than
American politics. Life was rural, harsh, full
of uncertainty-e-conditions obviously not con­ducive
to the nurture of art-e-and most import­ant,
there was little leisure in which to produce
an enjoy music. A frontier community is poor
-and two notable results were the absence of
cathedrals and therefore of a tradition of choral
singing, and the absence of any patronage of
the arts. It was not until the frontier receded
that the older communities had any opportuni­ties
for music.
For over one hundred years, New England's
music was largely psalmody-ultimately so
badly sung that a melody sung in time and in
tune was offensive. By 1760, however, secular
* * * * * * * * *
EUTERPE AMERiCA-By
Alberta Shearer
* * * * * * * * *
ica by saying, inthe words of an early patriotic
ballad, "New England's God forever reigns."
New England's God was a stern God, and the
elect in America were probably even more
stern, but there is no sufficient evidence to
prove that either of them ever legislated against
music, which was
"to be sung in private houses for their
godly solace and comfort, laying apart all
ungodly Songs and Ballads, which tend
only to tJ.e nourishment of vice and the
corrupting of youth"
Such an austere attitude, .though it did not
deny music, naturally tended to encourage
music of a certain character, and this explains
why the earlier American music is New Eng­land
psalmody. In pursuit of the economic .vir­tues
and of the worldly success which was evi­dence
of divine favor, the Puritans probably
felt that music for its own sake was, if not sin­ful,
at least impractical and unproductive-an
attitude which has had an unfortunate persist­ence.
If the Puritan temperament was not parti­cularly
congenial to music, neither were the
13
music had crept stealthily into the lives of New
Englanders, and the number of concerts that
were performed is really quite surprising. The
same thing was true, of course, of other parts
of the country - Boston, Philadelphia, New
York and Charleston being centres of consider­able
musical activity.
Of equal importance with the frontier has
been immigration. Beginning at the close of
the 17th century, a real impetus was given to
music, by German, Swedish and Moravian im­migrants,
who brought with them a highly
developed choral art, the extensive use of in­struments
and an appreciation of such works
as Haydn's "Creation" and "The Seasons." The
stream of immigration evidenced, especially
after 1848, as increasing urbanization and in­creased
railway mileage offered escape from
unrest in Europe. The influence of this immi­gration
.was extensive: most of the performers
were foreigners, many of the various musical
societies which were spring up were founded
by foreigners (e.g., Germania orchestra of
1848). More important, it meant the introduc-
tion of higher standards, because these foreign
musicians were all thoroughly trained.
Of course, this immigration raised the prob­lem
of whether it was preventing American
composers from getting a hearing. Once sepa­rated
from England, Americans had become
increasingly conscious of national feelings, but
not yet to the point of a declaration of inde­pendence
from Europe in art. In literature,
Washington Irving had started it, but it came
more slowly in music. Howard* believes that
the most important result of the invasion of
1848 was that it made the American composer
conscious of himself,· and "if at first he had to
fight for his existence with poor equipment and
meagre talents, the very contrast afforded by
his foreign rivals made an issue of his rights."
The pioneers in the awakening of a national
consciousness-men like Anton Heinrich, Wil­liam
Henry Fry and George Bristow-have
largely been forgotten, but not the things they
were insisting on, and many of their comments
remain true today.
Preoccupation with music w:as increasing in
the 19th century. A solid foundation was be­ing
laid by men like Lowell Mason, the pioneer
in music teaching in the public schools; his son
William, champion of high standards and fore­most
piano teacher of his day, and Theodore
Thomas, the conductor who practically carried
out a one-man revolution in music appreciation.
Finally there appeared musicians who are re­membered
for their music as much as for their
historical importance. John Knowles Paine
was the first American composer to win ser­ious
consideration abroad. But he and his con­temporaries
tended to be restricted in their in­dividuality
by the dominance of Germany in
the musical world. To some extent-the Boston
.group escaped this, notably Chadwick, whom
Howard considers American in his Yankee im­pertinence;
Foote, who was exceptional in that
he didn't study abroad, and, to a lesser degree
Horatio Parker and Mrs. Beach.
American music was climbing the heights,
and while it i~ hardly possible to consider
Ethelbert Nevin a peak of achievement, that
position can hardly be denied to Edward Mac­Dowell,
the first American composer of any
real stature, and (in Howard's words), "the
first of the Americans to speak consistently a
* J. T. Howard-"Our American Music."
14
musical speech that was definitely his own."
MacDowell brings us to the twentieth cen­tury,
and here the difficulty is to select and to
appraise American music, to judge its worth
and to see where it is going. In order to talk
about American music, it seems to be neces­sary
to have a rough working definition-such
as Howard's-
"a composer is an American, if by birth or
choice of permanent residence, he becomes
identified with American life and institu­tions
before his talents have had their
greatest outlet; and through his associa­tions
and sympathies he makes a genuine
contribution to our cultural development."
Residence alone does not establish a composer
as an American. Delius lived in Florida, but
his music is impossible to label. Most of us
would not consider Percy Grainger an Ameri­can,
yet he is an American citizen, and Howard
insists that he is "American in association,
sympathies, understanding" and that his music
is American in its idealism and in the verve
with which it translates the Anglo-Saxon-Old
English traits of our (Le., the Am.) heritage."
In spite of his long residence in the United
States, Ernest Black is too Jewish and too con­tinental
to be considered an Arrierican com­poser.
The recent refugees retain their con­tinental
manner and associations.
Just what characteristics make a composer
American? John Alden Carpenter is highly
American, and at the same time perhaps un­American
in his intense subjective feeling for
the moods of nature. Or is that an un-Ameri­can
characteristic? Since music can hardly be
produced in a vacuum, Charles Griffes may be
influenced by his German teachers, by French
impressionism and by Russian orientalism,
without ceasing to be an American. Daniel
Gregory Mason insists that Am!rican music is
necessarily eclectic and cosmopolitan, and that
its distinctiveness must be individual rather
than national.
In a survey such as this it is Impossible to
discuss even the most notable of the modern
American composers. Among the older group
I wouldmention Charles Martin Laeffler, John Charles Alden Carpenter, Charles Griffes, and Deems
Taylor; while outstanding among the younger
composers are Howard Hanson, Aaron Cop­land,
Roger Sessions, Howard MacDowell and
Roy Harris. Of these, Harris is frequently
spoken of as the most authentically American
voice among the modern composers. David
Ewen said of him:
"Here is as native an American product as
Carl Sandberg. His melodies are obviously the
speech of a Western temperament in its angu­lar
line. Its vitality is an expression of Ameri­can
health and youth"; and Horatio Parker
added that Harris is an American "first in a
pervading directness, in a recurring and un­affected
roughness of musical speech. . . He is
also American in broad design, full voice, a
certain abruptness. . . The rhythms are un­even,
unconventional, changeable, irregular.
There is no mistaking their propulsive force.
They seem to derive from the West that bred
Mr. Harris..."
There are two critics discerning distinctive­ly
American characteristics. Listening to mod­ern
American music, I can discern only one
note which seems to be common to them all,
and that is a certain bigness, a sense of breadth.
and space.
The American musical scene is not with­out
its encouraging features. Notable among
these are the lavish donations from wealthy
patrons, various forms of financial aid to tal­ented
students, funds to provide for the pub­lication
of American music, and various musi­cal
institutions of high standing. Frequently
mentioned as commendable are the interest
which women take in music, and the various
ingenious devices for calling attention to music
-these might be suspect as indicating a dan­gerous
faddishness. Recognition of music as a
part of general education has been widespread,
and in this field great advances have been
made. It is becoming i~creasingly evident that
America has a musical public.
Still, the picture is not one of unqualified
brightness. Less pleasant aspects are a certain
snobbishness which identifies Americanism
with immaturity and crudity, and the rever­ence
accorded to a European name and train­ing.
While this is decreasing to some extent in
the field of performance-American-born and
even American-trained performers being given
a hearing-a certain prejudice remains both in
performance and in composition.
The question of the American composer is
a fascinating one. The old complaint is that
composers do not make money from their com­positions,
hence the large percentage of them
who teach, conduct, or perform. Another com-
15
mon complaint is that the American composer
does not get a hearing-this is the subject of
many of Deems Taylor's Sunday afternoon
chats. The difficulty of getting a symphony
performed more than once or twice might ac­count
for the popularity of compositions in the
smaller forms. In 1929, there were 73 perman­ent
symphony orchestras, 55 chamber music
groups, 576 choral societies, and 35,000 public
school or university orchestras-which should
indicate a market for American work. But
many American works can be obtained only in
manuscript, and most of them are far less
easily available than the standard concert
works. Consequently, it is to the foremost
orchestras of the country that the composer
must turn, and here he comes face to face
with (as a rule) a European conductor. George
Bristow's complaint in 1854 that "the Philhar­monic
Society has been as anti-American as if
it had been located in London during the
Revolutionary War, and composed of native­born
British Tories" is probably an exaggera­tion,
but it indicates a state of affairs which in
.some cases still exists. And, as a rule, if an
American composer receives scant recogntion
in his own country, he usually faces even
worse in Europe.
The biggest question of all is, I suppose,
that of nationalism in music. In the middle of
the 19th century William Henry Fry declared
th~t there was no taste, love, or appreciation
for art in the United States. There was too
much servility on the part of American artists.
Until a declaration of independence in art
should be made, until American composers
should discard their foreign liveries and found
an American school, and until the American
public should learn to support American art­ists,
art would not become indigenous to this
country, but would only exist as a feeble exotic,
and Americans would continue to be provin­cials
in art. That was his contention, and it
might be rather depressing Jto reflect how much
of it still holds.
It is frequently contended that American
music will utilize the folk-music of the country.
The United States are rich in folk-music-s-that
of the Negro, of the American Indian particu­larly,
and also of the "hill billy" the cowboy,
the lumberjack. . Dvorak started the vogue of
using folk-music, and it was taken up by
(Continued on Page 25)
From MUNICH To SOFIA Fronl MUNICH "Whoever is master of Bohemia is master of Europe."-PRINCE VON BISMARCK.
chances of success in this sphere. In retrospect,
it has become increasingly evident that a free
and independent Czechoslovakia was the cor-t
I
SOFIA
t
'(
To
settlement of 1919 in eastern Europe by action
against Turkey and the Near Eastern status
quo as embodied in the Treaty of Lausanne. If
so, the occupation of Sofia improves Germany's
HE occupation of Bulgaria by German
armed forces marks a climax in the
extension of German control in central
and south-eastern Europe. Earlier efforts of the
National Socialist regime
were bent almost exclu­sively
towards the destruc­tion
of the Versailles status
quo in the west. From 1936,
the year of the formation of
the Rome-Berlin axis, and
more particularly from 1938,
the aim of Berlin had been
the disintegration of the
status quo established in
central and south-eastern
Europe by the Treaties of
St. Germain, Trianon and
Neuilly. By successive steps
the settlement drawn up in
the suburbs of Paris has
been upset. St. Germain
passed into history with the
occupation of Austria, the
Munich settlement and the
occupation of Bohemia; Tria­non
was almost completely
modified-by the Vienna con­ference
following Munich, by
the occupation of Ruthenia
by Hungary in 1939, and by
the partition of Transylvania
in 1940; Neuilly received its
first blow with the return of
the South Dobrudja to Bul­garia
last summer and is
now destined to be further
revised by the action of the
Bulgarian government in
linking its fate with the axis powers. It may
be the ultimate aim of German diplomacy to
complete the work of demolishing the peace
16
CD "The Strategic Importance of Czechoslovakia for
Western Europe" pp. 67-8.
Dr. Skilling can indeed be considered an authority on this matter. He 'mas
studying in Prague during the years of the Munich Pact and occupation of
Czechoslovakia.
In 1934 Dr. Skilling graduated in Political Science from the University of
Toronto. He went to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar and studied there from 1934
to 1936. In 1940 he received his Doctor of Philosophy degree in London, England.
He made a special study then of Czech-German relationships.
For the last year he has been with our own History Department.
"Vox" is pleased to present Dr. Skilling's article to its readers. It extends to
him its best wishes.
r
rIA
:f !I
~ction
atus
. e. If
~any's
~spect,
~ free
~ cor­i
By
H. G. Skilling, Ph.D.
ner-stone of the whole structure of peace and
security in eastern Europe and that its de­struction
in 1938 by the four western powers
opened the way for the German advance into
south-eastern Europe, now almost completed.
More than that, it rendered feasible a challenge
by Germany of the predominance of France
and Britain in the Near and Middle East and
India. Of this many Czechs were well aware.
Colonel Moravec, Czech military expert, wrote
in 1936: "If this territorial pentagon between
five seas (The Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, the
Mediterranean, the Red Sea and the Indian
Ocean) constitutes the 'vestibule' to the Indian
Ocean and to India, the Balkan Entente repre­sents
the main stairway to this vestibule and
the Little Entente its garden wall in which
Czechoslovakia represents the gate, Whoever
can break open that gate can reach that stair­way
and thence enter the vestibule."CD It might
be added that at Munich Mr. Chamberlain and
M. Daladier gave Hitler the key to the gate.
It is not out of place, at a moment when
German troops are a few miles from Salonika
and from Istanbul, to examine the strategic
significance of this fact and to glance back over
the chain of events which produced it. That­not
speculation as to future possibilities-is the
purpose of this article. The writer is keenly
aware that even before publication the last
word in the tide ,of this article might well bear
changing to "Belgrade" or "Salonika" yes, or
even Istanbul. But the content of the, article
would likely need no change-merely a post­script
to describe the later phases of a con­tinuous
development.
The question-who is to control south­eastern
Europe and hither Asia-has always
been a major concern to the European powers. .
17
Before the Great War, the Danube basin was
largely subject to the political rule of the Haps­burgs,
whereas the Near East and to some ex­tent
the Balkan peninsula were domains of the
Ottoman Turks. The area of conflict was
therefore limited to the Balkan region, includ­ing
the Bosphorus - Marmora - Dardanelles
waterway, where Turkish rule was either in­secure
or already thrown off. The continuing
weakening of Turkish rule and the rivalry of
neighbouring powers for the legacy of the Sul­tans
made the "Eastern question" as it was
then called, a matter of vital interest for the
Concert of Europe and for the Great Powers
individually. The conflict of 1914-1918 saw the
whole area in the hands of the Central Powers,
partly as a result of the collaboration of Bul­garia,
Austria-Hungary and Turkey with Ger­many,
partly as a result of the successful mili­tary
campaigns against Rumania and Serbia.
Indeed, more than this, the Central Powers con­trolled
the entire length of the land route from
Berlin to Bagdad, from the North Sea to the
Persian Gulf. The importance of German con­trol
of this route-the "transversal Eurasian
axis" as it has been called-is too obvious to
need emphasis. Strategically, it meant the seal­ing
of the "back door" to Germany by way of
the Balkans, the separation of Russia from her
western allies and the exposing of the flanks
of Russia and the British Empire-in the Cau­casus,
and in Egypt and the Suez respectively.
Economically, it meant the control of a vast
area rich in resources-in particular the con­trol
of the oil-producing regions of Rumania
and the Middle East. Politically, it would have
given Germany and her allies an enormous
advantage in the struggle for redistributing
territorial possessions at the end of a victorious
war, providing direct access to Africa, the Near
East and India. It is significant that Britain
sought desperately throughout the war to re-
gain control of the "Eurasian axis" at a n~m­ber
of widely separated points. What has Just
been said of its importance goes far to explain
the British drive into Mesopotamia from the
Persian Gulf, the Allenby campaign in Pales­tine,
the occupation of Salonika and the at­tempt
to seize the Dardanelles.
With the peace settlement after 1918, the
area of possible conflict between the Great
Powers in eastern Europe was enlarged by the
destruction of the Hapsburg and the Ottoman
Empires and the establishment of a number of
small and relatively weak states in their place.
. Turkey retained the all-important gateways
between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean
and between Europe and Asia, but the coast
of the Eastern Mediterranean and its hinter­land
fell under British and French control and
Central and Eastern Europe was subjected to
French influence. Almost a complete reversal
of position had occurred, although the control
exercised by France and Britain was not as
complete as the war control.exercised by Ger­many
and her allies. Nonetheless, Germany,
instead of dominating the whole of the land
route from Hamburg to the Persian Gulf, found
that her control ended at her own frontier.
The Czech frontier guards along the Sudeten
mountains personified the change in strategic
relations which had occurred. As long as the
Czech state remained independent and in the
French camp, as long as Austria preserved the
independence guaranteed by the Treaty of St.
Germain, as long as Italy, controlling the
Brenner pass and Trieste, the western entrance
to the Danube basin, resisted revisionism and
German expansion, Germany was entirely shut
off from the entire Danubian and Balkan re­gion.
Furthermore, an elaborate structure_ of
pacts and agreements was built up by the
victor states in that region-in the form 9£ the
Little Entente and the Balkan Entente-to en­circle
and render impotent the two potential
allies of Germany: Hungary and Bulgaria.
Austria and Poland, if not friendly, were at
least not at first on intimate terms with the
Reich and acted as buffer states. Czecho­slovakia,
linked with France and Russia after
1935, counted on their immediate intervention
in case of a German aggression. Linked with
Rumania in the Little Entente, Czechoslovakia
indirectly controlled the whole of the great
protective arc of the Carpathians and the
18
Transylvanian Alps which shields the Danube
basin from attacks from north and east, and
had access to the Black Sea. Linked with
Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia indirectly control­led
the eastern coast of the Adriatic and the
mountains to the south and west of the Danube
basin, thus enjoying a safeguard in the event
of an Italo-German rapproachement. Finally,
Czechoslovakia's allies-Rumania and Yugo­slavia-
were linked, in the Balkan Entente,
with Turkey and Greece on the Aegean and
could expect their assistance if subjected to an
attack by a Great Power, joined by a Balkan
state.
Munich withdrew the lynch-pin and caused
the collapse of this structure of security. An­other
Czech-Hubert Ripka, noted journalist­wrote
in "Munich: Before and After" "The
fall of Czechoslovakia opened for Germany
an unimpeded passage to the whole Danube
basin."0 True, the defences of central and
south-eastern Europe had already been weak­ened
before September, 1938. The abandon­ment
of Austria by Mussolini (July, 1936), the
formation of the Rome-Berlin Axis (October,
1936), and the treaty of friendship between
Italy and Yugoslavia (March, 1937), had open­ed
up gaps in the defence works of the Danube
basin and the Balkan peninsula. The annexa­tion
of Austria in March, 1938, put Germany
on the Danube at Vienna and exposed Hun­gary
and Yugoslavia to increased Axis pres­sure.
Nonetheless, until Munich, the fortress
of Czechoslovakia remained outside German
control, rendered any German military ad­vance
down the Danube dangerously exposed
on its northern flank, and formed the central
point in the east-west axis, Paris-Prague­Moscow,
designed to discourage German ag­gression.
Munich reversed the situation com­pletely.
The east-west axis collapsed com­pletely,
as a result of France's default in her
obligations. The fortified Sudeten range passed
into German hands, leaving the rump of
Czechoslovakia helpless against a German' at­tack.
The Czech threat to a German advance.
down the Danube was removed; the danger of a
war on two fronts needed no longer to bulk so
large in Hitler's calculations. The Little En­tente
ceased to be of any practical importance.
Hungary, having secured parts of Slovakia in
.'
0p.301.
rectification of the "Trianon dictate" was more
than ever exposed to German influence and
joined theanti-comiritern pact in February,
1939. The promise of a guarantee of the new
borders of Czechoslovakia by the Munich
powers was never fulfilled.
The occupation of Bohemia and Moravia
and the establishment of an independent Slo­vak
puppet state in March, 1939, carried the
process a few stages further. The last vestiges
of Czech independence disappeared, and Ger­man
troops were in "peaceful" occupation.
of the Moravian plain and of the Danube as far
as Bratislavia.
Military control of a section of the Carpath­ians
on the 'Slovak-Polish frontier passed into
German hands through her domination of Slo­vak
policy and provided a further safeguard
against eventual Polish or Russian assaults
from Galicia. The seizure by Hungary of the
extreme eastern tip of what had been Czecho­slovakia
- Ruthenia or Carpatho-Ukraine­gave
her, and hence indirectly Germany, com­mand
of another section of the Carpathians,
including the important Uzok pass linking
Lwow in Poland with the Theiss valley in
Hungary. British guarantees to Poland, Ru­mania
and Greece and the opening of negotia­tions
with the Soviet Union seemed, however,
to augur a change in 'British policy towards
Eastern Europe. Although Central Europe had
passed firmly into German hands, there still
seemed a possibility that her control there
might be shaken from north and east and that
further expansion into the Balkans proper
might be prevented.
The failure to reach agreement with the
U.S.S.R. and the early collapse of Poland
after the outbreak of war iIfaugurated a new
phase in the German penetration of the Balkan
peninsula. Poland was eliminated from. the
European military and diplomatic scene, and
the whole of the Slovak northern frontier thus
rendered immune from attack. .At the same
time the failure of Britain. and France to give
effective aid to Poland diminished the value of
their guarantees to states on the periphery of
the region of conflict. On the other hand, Rus­sia's
dash across eastern Poland, although ap­parently
conceived as a measure of defence of
her own territories against future German ag­gression,
affected the strategic situation of Ger­many
in south-eastern Europe. The Soviet
Union did not secure a common frontier with
German-controlled Slovakia along the Carpath­ians,
but did achieve a common frontier with
Hungarian-controlled Ruthenia in another sec­tor
of the Carpathians. In this way she pre­vented
any possible German advance into
Rumania from the north and protected the
Ukraine against invasion from German forces
entering Russian territory through the passes
of the Carpathians. At the same time the Red
Army was now for the first time stationed on
the Carpathians and constituted a permanent
threat to the German-controlled Danube. The
seizure of Bessarabia and the Bukovina in
June, 1940, although primarily a defensive
move, also had important results for south­eastern
Europe. Russian troops now looked
across the Pruth River into the Moldavian
plain and towards the Ploesti oilfield at the
south-eastern tip of the Carpathian horseshoe;
Russian troops were occupying Cernauti, in the
Bukovina, at the head of the railway leading
through Moldavia toPloesti. In addition,
Soviet forces were now stationed at one of the
mouths of the Danube, across from Dobrudja,
and were thus brought much closer to Bul­garia
and to Bucharest. Collective resistance
. to German advance by Rumania and Bulgaria,
assisted by the Soviet Union, might have turn':'
ed the tide of German success even at that late
date and kept German troops north-west of the
Iron Gate on the Danube and of the Transyl­vanian
Alps.
Germany realized the danger and at once
took advantage of the divisions within the Bal­kan
states and of the hostility of Balkan gov­ernments
to the U.S.R.R. Hungary and Bul­garia
were used as instruments of pressure on
Rumania, who, fearing to turn to Russia for
aid, was thereby isolated. In August, Rumania
was forced to agree to the cession of Southern
Dobrudja to Bulgaria. More important still,
the Vienna "arbitration" settled the Hungarian­Rumanian
conflict by the partition of Transyl­vania,
granting Hungary a part of her terri­torial
claims against Rumania, The decision
was made, however, not so much to satisfy
Hungarian revisionist sentiment as to satisfy
Germany's strategic requirements. The part­ition
was so devised as to give to Hungary,
Germany's partner, a new boundary running
along the Carpathian range to the bend in the
arc. This exposed the Moldavian plain to an
19
eventual German descent from the mountains
and to some extent counteracted the Russian
advance to the Pruth already mentioned. Not
satisfied with this, in mid-October, 1940, Ger­many
secured permission from the pro-German
Antonescu regime in Rumania to send troops
into that country through Hungary. Germany
thus protected herself further against the
U.S.S.R. and at the same time put herself in a
position to take full advantage of an Italian
victory in the forthcoming Albanian campaign.
It might well have been expected that Italy
would make short work of Greece and that
Germany would then join her in putting pres­sure
on Bulgaria and Turkey. As it turned
out, what was intended as an offensive action
by the Axis became a measure of defence
against the successful Greek army, and more
and more troops were poured into Rumania.
From December onward, a spate of rumours
indicated that Germany would invade Bul­garia.
It did not then occur, but it could not
be overlooked that a further stage of German
penetration of the Balkans had been accom­plished.
German troops were now on the lower
reaches of the Danube and on the Black Sea.
The British guarantee to Rumania had lapsed.
. The German diplomatic offensive at the end
of November had brought Hungary, Rumania
and Slovakia into the tri-partite alliance of
Germany, Italy and Japan. One member of the
Balkan Entente-Rumania-was helpless in
the grip of an occupying army, and another­Greece-
was battling in Albania against Italian
forces. Yet their fellow members of the En­tente-
Turkey and Yugoslavia-had not gone
to their help, having indeed no legal obligations
to do so. Nor had Turkey gone to the help of
Greece under the pact of 1933; by which the
two states had mutually guaranteed their com­mon
frontiers and pledged the use of military
force in their defence. Nonetheless, Bulgaria
and Yugoslavia had not joined the German-e
Italian camp, and Bulgaria gave no indication
that she was going to take advantage of the
situation to settle old claims against Greece,
as she had done against Rumania. It seemed
as though the tendency of Bulgaria to come
closer to the Balkan Entente, already indicated
by the treaty of friendship between Bulgaria
and Yugoslavia in January, 1937, and by the
treaty of friendship and non-aggression be­tween
Bulgaria and the Balkan Entente, in
July, 1938, was producing at least negative
results.
The occupation of Bulgaria by German
troops ends another phase in the extension of
German control of the Berlin-Bagdad axis.
German troops are now within a few miles of
the Aegean at Salonika and of the Bosphorus
at Istanbul. Bulgaria has thrown in her lot
with Germany, hoping, no doubt, to secure her
long-desired access to the Aegean in Thrace
and, possibly, to satisfy her claims on Mace­donia
in northern Greece and southern Yugo­slavia.
Her recent pact with Turkey, condemn­ing
aggression, seems to preclude direct attrack
by Bulgaria on Turkey or Greece, but does not
exclude German diplomatic or even military
pressure on one or other of these two. If Bul­garia
joined in the attack on Greece, Turkey
might consider herself bound, under the Bal­kan
Entente or the Greco-Turkish pact of
1933, to assist Greece. On the other hand, this
eventuality might not occur, if Yugovalia per­mitted
the passage of German troops down the
Morava-Vardar valley to Salonika. If for any
reason this proved impossible, Germany would
then have to take the more difficult route from
Sofia through the Struma valley into northern
Greece. In this case Turkey would be faced
with a difficult decision. She is pressed by her
ally, Britain, to enter the war in tardy fulfill­ment
of her obligations, give aid to Greece and
resist the German advance. She is pressed by
the Soviet Union, with whom her relations are
close and friendly, to keep out of the war, put
up a stiff diplomatic front to Germany, main­tain
her control of the Dardanelles and keep
British warships out of the Black Sea, and, if
necessary, to deflect the German advance west­wards
in the Balkans, away from the sphere of
Russian strategic interests. She will no doubt
defend herself against direct attack, with the
approval of Britain and Russia. What she
. would do in the event of a German penetration
of Yugoslavia or Greece is much more doubt­ful.
20
"Mountains and stars, clouds and the white sea-foam,
Flames, snows and children-should not these suffice,
But this hep,rt-breaking loveliness must come
Gleaming through all-life that willingly dies?"
-L LASCELLES ABERCROMBIE, "Inscription." ASCELLES ABERCROMBIE, "Inscription."
and bridges and monuments and, someday-a
cathedral. Tomorrow ..."
The choir was singing the anthem. How
loud it was! She wished it had been something
quiet and consoling. But this was Easter. One
had to be jubilant at Easter.
She remembered the last time they had
talked before he enlisted. Her arguments had
seemed so good. There was no need, she had
said, at least no pressing need; besides there
were greater ways in which he was to serve.
He had only smiled-s-klndly, but implying that
she didn't understand.
He had talked about believing in a thing
and being willing to pay the price. He had
talked about victory costing something. Still
she didn't understand.
Slowly as from a great distance words be­gan
to force themselves in upon her attention,
words that the minister was using-"the need
for sacrifice"-"the price of victory." These
were words that Bill had used. Suddenly she
came back to earth again, to the church with
its lily-decked altar, to the men and women
about her, to Easter. Was there any connection
between Easter and the things of which Bill
had spoken? But, of course-she saw now.
Easter meant exactly those things. Easter was
the story of a price that had been paid for Vic­tory.
She was beginning to understand. She
did understand.· She must write to Bill at once
-today. He would be glad to know that she
did understand. .
The letter arrived on the following morn­ing.
The envelope was addressed in an un­familiar
script and more an English postmark
in the corner. Eagerly and yet with a strange
fear she tore it open. As she unfolded the
sheet of paper something small and cold fell
into the palm of her hand.
"Dear Miss --" the letter began, "It is
with deep reluctance that I write to tell you of
the· death of Flying Officer William Davies,
who was killed in action on March 7th ..."
There was more-more about courage and dar­ing,
but somehow the words seemed blurred
and she couldn't understand them. And then
the last sentence. "He wanted me to send you
this ..."
She became conscious again of the small,
cold object in the palm of her hand. She looked
down. It was a thin chain of gold and on the
chain-a tiny cross.
The Letter T Byh Mearjorie Peck By Marjorie Peck
Letter
T WAS strange, Chris thought, how
far apart one's mind and body could
:r. , be. Take now, for instance. She sat in
church remotely conscious that one of the
notches in her spine was sticking uncomfort­ably
into the wooden seat. But her mind was
busy with a thousand shining things of mem­ory
which had not even the slightest connection
with her surroundings.
It was not that she made a practice of going
to church. She supposed that it would be pos­sible
to count on the fingers of one hand the
times she had attended in the last year, but­well,
it was Easter and Bill would have liked
her to go. She wondered vaguely whether Bill
would be able to attend an Easter service. Per­haps
there were too many important things in
England which left no time for churches and
for Easter.
Mechanically she rose with the congregation
to sing the opening hymn. She was annoyed at
having her thread of thought broken. When it
was over she sat down and took up the thread
again.
She remembered the -days--student days­soon
after they had first met. A dozen inci­dents
from that crazy, carefree time crowded
back into her consciousness. There was the
night when they had ...
She became aware that the offering was in
process. She reached in her purse for a quarter.
There was only a dime in change. Oh well, it
would have to do.
She remembered those other occasions, not
so frequent, when he had led her up his high
hill of dreams from whose tall summit, hand in
hand, they had' looked out over the rolling vista
of the future. With the deep enthusiasm of the
artist within him, he would draw before her
eyes his design for that future. "Today, Chris"
he would say, "it's books and blueprints. To­morrow
I'll make them come alive-buildings
21
"I've lo~t my ticket for the tow."
.. Just give the man a Sweet Cap. '!
SWEET CAPORAL CIGARETTES
"The purestform in which tobacco can be smoked"
22
UNITED COLLEGE MUSIC CLUB
A GRAND DUEL
lWJ J " HERE are you going?"
.,~ "The College Music Club."
. ._, "Say, I hear it's really good."
"We're doing Tschaikowsky tonight; you
should be there. Fred Brickenden and Doug
Tunstell are staging a grand duel-I've waited
a month for this."
They trodded on for another half block,
when finally one turned, ascended the steps of
a nice warm home, and bid his companion
adieu. I followed swiftly. When we entered,
the following dialogue had already com­menced.
Brickenden-Ldon't see why Tschaikowsky
can't be placed beside the three B's. In his
music there is a breadth of passion and emotion
which no other composer has ever equalled---
Tunstell-Thank heaven! I never heard
such a galaxy of dismalno~es chained together
in one unhealthy phrase. 'He lacks any sense
of balance, yet he is not brilliant enough to be
called original.
Brickenden-But his melodies-where have
you heard such heart-rending, beautiful mel­odies?
Tunstell-What's beautiful about morbidity
and frustration the, way he hammers at it?
Glorified misery-that's all it is! How glorious
and wonderful it must be to wallow in the ditch
shouting cries of animalistic force as you swal­low
thorn after thorn!
Brickenden - But can't you appreciate
Tschaikowsky's music as music?
Tunstell-In a way-- but that is not our
purpose here tonight. We were asked to de­cide
if Tschaikowsky belongs among the great
composers of classical music such as Bach,
Beethoven, and Brahms.
Brickenden-s-Well, doesn't he?
Tunstell-Absolutelynot! Take his con­temporary
Brahms, who outstrips him on every
point. "None but the Lonely Heart" looks
absolutely sick beside the "Sapphic Ode" or
23
In which a Great Russian's
Bones are Almost Disturbed Bones "Von Ewiger Liebe." There is not a chorus of
Tschaikowsky's to compare with Brahms'
"Ossians Fingal" or the "Liebeslieder Waltzes"
and any of Tschaikowsky's piano works just
wilt when set beside Brahms' Intermezzi or
the Variations on a Theme by Paganini, And
the Concertos! Surely you will not dare to
suggest that the B flat minor piano Concerto of
Tschaikowsky can approach the one in D
minor of Brahms in point of greatness. Then
consider Brahms' superb Violin Concerto-an
absolute monument in violin writing. Please
don't mention Tschaikowsky's Concerto in the
same breath. And then Chamber Music:
Tschaikowsky gives us nothing comparable to
the quartets, trios and duets of Brahms.
Brickenden-But the Symphonies!
Tunstell-Oh, the devil! They're absolutely
worn out! It's a good thing jazz occasionally
dusts off the precious mould from a lot of his
melodies-they certainly become monotonous.
In short, Tschaikowsky wrote' nothing that I
could compare with the majestic grandeur of
Brahms' Symphony in C minor.. Just because
Brahms doesn't wail at a melody and use every
tear-jerking contrivance at his disposal that is
not to say that he is unemotional or that he is
divorced from reality.
Brickenden-Hold on here! Let me get this
straight. Do you suggest that Brahms is more
sincere than Tschaikowsky?
Tunstell-Well, I know that old Peter lived
an abnormal life and I suppose he did write
from the heart. But just because a composer
mixes a shade of rationalism into his music
you cannot say that he is less sincere. Music
is a science and a craft; emotions by themselves
will never make for greatness.
Brickenden-You cannot deny Tschaikow­sky's
popularity. Millions can't be wrong!
Tunstell-They most certainly can! Just
because the public cannot rise above the mere
sensuality of life let us not suppose that mere
sensuality is great.
Brickenden-Tschaikowsky's music is im­mortal
music-immortal because of its sin­cerity
and passion.
Tunstell-Immortal? I feel the reason for
Beethoven's immortality is that he never says
the same thing twice. His symphonies are so
full of the reality of life that we learn some­thing
new each time we listen to them. Tschai­kowsky
becomes boring after continual repeti­tion
because his music always tells the same
old woeful tale.
Brickenden-But what about Tschaikow­sky's
mastery of the orchestra? Surely no one
could challenge him on that point.
Tunstell-I grant you he has mastered
orchestral technique just as Liszt mastered
pianoforte technique. But that neither makes
Liszt or Tschaikowsky great composers.
Brickenden-Why not appreciate Tschai­kowsky
by himself?
Tunstell-A breath of fresh air was prob­ably
what killed the frustrated introvert! You
have to compare him with someone in order to
evaluate his place in music--
Brickenden-Which I still maintain is great!
Tunstell"::"Which I still maintain is feeble! !
* *I * *
Silence!
* * * *
Dr. Thompson finally broke the tension by
announcing that he thought we should now
listen to some Tschaikowsky. A recording of
the fourth Symphony followed (much to the
disgust of Mr. Tunstell and the delight of Mr.
Brickenden). Then Gordon Harland sang
"None but the Lonely Heart" accompanied at
the piano by Florence Adamson. Then came
Don Pratt's touching performance of the second
movement of the violin Concerto-Dennis Ro­berts
played the orchestral part on the piano.
Margaret Randall climaxed the entertainment
with selections from "The Seasons."
Betty Morrison followed with a sympath­etic
appreciation of Tschaikowsky's life.
Ramona Oland read passages from Tilman's
book on Symphonic Music and although they
24
agreed the reading was quite pleasing, they
felt the contents were positively ghastly.
What followed would require a combination
of Foster Hewitt and John Milton to narrate.
Bodies were removed so swiftly that the pros­pect
of Dr. Thompson finding himself com­pletely
alone was not remote.
Miss Adamson-I hope they don't decide to
drag up Tschaikowsky's bones to solve the
situation.
Miss Randall-There's nothing like a good
old skeleton to bring people back to their
senses!
Referee Pratt judged the meeting a good
one. An ancient custom of the Music Club is
to appoint a different critic for each meeting,
the purpose being to give each member an op­portunity
at musical criticism. Don Pratt seized
the honor for that evening and Brickenden
and Tunstell both trembled when the minute '
book was finally exposed.
Perhaps
I saw a rose with dew upon it ...
Dew drops like luminous pearls
Hanging as a necklace, shimmering on every leaf
And quivering on the soft-red, curling petals.
I saw that rose as the pale dawn broke
Over a mountain top. . . I watched it as
The pink-gold light glowed upon its leaves and
Filled the earth with a shaking rainbow day.
1 thought that rose was Beauty
And I caught my breath in wonderment and
thrill.
But even as I watched the dew-hung flower
A deer with limpid eyes, deep with dreams,
crossed the grass
And scattered all the rose leaves and the dew.
My "Beauty" gone, only my memory remained
among the broken leaves.
But perhaps the deer Was Beauty truly . . .
For the deer is Life and pulsing mov~ment, and
The rose was still and bloodless . . .
Perhaps the deer is Beauty everlasting . . .
DONNA McRAE.
Euterpe America
(Continued from Page 15)
American composers for one of two motives­either
to make something out of the melodyor
as a means of shaking. off the European yoke.
Composers like Cadman, MacDowell and
Guion have used folk-music. But nationalism
is something subtler than using Indian or other
tunes found in America. MacDowell realized
this: "I do not believe in lifting a Navajo theme
and furbishing it into some kind of a musical
composition and calling it American music.
Our problem is not so simple as all that." And
in a lecture he said, "What we must arrive at is
the youthful optimistic vitality and the un­daunted
tenacity of spirit that characterizes the
American man. That is what I hope to see
echoed in American music."
American music can probably never be na­tional
in the sense that Russian or Norwegian
music is-s-i.e., music of a single race. The
character of the "melting pot" has stamped it­self
indelibly on American life. A Negro folk­melody
is exotic to a Polish-American. Cos­mopolitanism
will be a characteristic of Ameri­can
music, rather than a basis in raciality.
Composers, therefore, have followed Mac­Dowell's
lead, and turned to American life,
utilizing skyscrapers and flivvers, and also less
concrete things-American youthfulness, vigor,
optimism, idealism. Many have felt that jazz
offers the best medium for composers who are
seeking to portray American life. Whiteman
and Gershwin sought to make an honest woman
out of jazz; and other more serious composers
have attempted to escape from its rigid limita­tions
and make it the basis for authentically
American music.
On the subject of Americanism in music,
the conclusion of Percy Grainger seems ade­quate:
"If any definitely American school
should at last emerge its specific qualities or
common denomination will probably represent
what is distinctive in American life and thought
rather than a new raciality. And it will not
come by deliberately adopting this idiom or
thought, for a national composer is such only in
so far as he is personal in his expression and so
far as his personality happens naturally to
affirm a nationality." For after all, in music
as in literature, Americanism is not in itself
an epithet of blame or praise, but merely a
useful classification.
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25
.. Tomorrow begins Today
(Continued from Page 3)
society that the First Great War failed to up­set.
The state in the inter-war period was like
the first horseless carriage with its dashboard
and whipholder. As improvements came along
we kept the same old buggy-put a powerful
motor in it-a new set of wheels and a radio.
But it was still the same old chassis. The
traffic laws and the roads had all the indivi­dualism
of the horse and buggy days. Some of
the vehicles were guided by the discordant
shouting, pushing and pulling of all the occu­pants.
Others had one driver to whom nobody
dared speak. With intent gaze he headed di­rectly
for his goal. And it took the traffic jam
of the Second Great War to make us see the
necessity for remodelling, rebuilding, rechart­ing
and agreeing to limit the speed and direc­tion
of our cars to permit movement for all.
In the libraries and laboratories of the world
today there is a great accumulation of know­ledge.
Knowledge that can set us free if it can
be implemented in society. But our wisdom
lags and we use only the superfiicial benefits of
our discoveries - comforts, foods, clothing,
shelter, rapid transportation, health and lon­gevity.
These were given to us by the spirit
and the methods of Science'. But .unless they
are wisely used and distributed they become
dangerous.
We have increased the speed of life,~ but not
its tide and volume; we have increased its
. movement, but not its cubic content; we have
made life easier and freer, but we have not
strengthened its moral fibre. Science speeds
on and stateseraft creeps far in the rear. A new
world is here and the old moral and political
codes impede the way.
This state of affairs occurs again and again
in history. Someti~es the barriers are easily
pushed aside; sometimes a civilization fails to
get by. So fell Egypt, Greece and Rome.
Yet men always want to be righteous. They
want to obey the will of God. But they have
various ideas of the will of God and they lack
the engineering details of the way to become
righteous. "Be ye fruitful, multiply and re­plenish
the earth" was good advice to a no­madic
tribe of herdsmen. But in many places
and with many people on earth today it is
26
surely the wrong procedure. The Decalogue
might have been sufficient for the tribes of
Israel, but are most inadequate for the govern­ance
of the League of Nations. There has never
been a complete revelation. It is our sacred
responsibility to work out the codes that can
be sufficient unto our day. We must replace
the old laws which were tribal and immediate,
with new ones that are generational, cosmic
and immediate to our world-needs of today.
FOR THE first time in history we have a
. chance to become righteous, a chance to
measure truth, find the will of God and become
Christians in a fuller sense.
No one man can lead us out. No nation is
adequate. No age is sufficient or final.
Man through the ages tried to fly. Indivi­duals
were unsuccessful. But a science, which
took in the accumulated knowledge of the
ages gathered over the whole earth, was able
through co-operative effort to do the impos­sible.
Our great advances must always be "over
the tombs, forward." It is our world only for a
while; it was made for us to remake it for
posterity.
Individually we are so helpless! Collective­ly
we are strong. Imagine the power and
might of a thousand million ~nlightened souls
possessed of the sacrificial spirit of the soldier,
working in times of peace to make a world
that is clean, safe and happy for all. Think of
these people armed with the microscope; the
telescope, the spectroscope, the test-tube and
the statistician's curve, motivated by the re­search
institute method and guided by the
spirit of service and brotherhood. All that is
almost within our reach if we but dedicate our­selves
to Democracy and Christianity as we so
often profess to do.
Democracy and Christianity go hand in
hand. The former grows out of the three basic
principles of the latter.
First, the belief in the matchless value of
human personality. This taken by itself leads
to the save-your-own-soul attitude and the
license of laissez-faire if not guided by the
second principle which is that of the brother­hood
of man. Out of the latter principle comes
the fallacy that all men are equal and the top
must be kept down to the level of the bottom
if we are not motivated by another belief.
This third principle is the belief in love or
service. My service must be commensurate
with my talents. I must believe in the rights of
all men; I would take counsel with them and
serve the best ideals with all my might. Surely
the days of rugged individualism are dead.
We have left behind the great search for
individual wealth. Life became a great race
for getting, wearing, eating, drinking and be­ing
treated for over-indulgence.
Truly our standards of living went up. Be­ing
well-dressed and well-fed, the individual
gained a sense of importance; talked of his
rights; knew he could rise from rags to riches
and' tried to do so. He emphasized democracy
because it was good for business. Talked glibly
of liberty and used it to excess. Nothing fails
like excess.
Now is the time for some simple truths and.
much heart-searching to tie together the three
principles we mentioned and thus make a start
at having Democracy and Christianity in our
daily lives.
So far, except in a few places for a few
people and for a few brief moments, this world
has been only a place in which to fight and
freeze and starve, with now and then a snatch
of poetry, song and wine. And yet we know
that it could be made a congenial, decent home
in which to live, to love, to marry and to raise
children, who could carryon the torch.
The medi~eval world accepted its hard con­ditions.
You must suffer much here to get a
great reward in Heaven, said they. The old
Indian priest warned the youth on coming to
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manhood: "You are born into a world of suf­fering.
Suffer, then, and hold your peace!"
For us, such attitudes spell defeatism and
we shall not accept them. We refuse to be
daunted by the failure of a generation or an
age. We believe that the Brotherhood of Man
can become a reality; that individualism can
be balanced with socialism; that business and
Christianity can be compatibles and that
Democracy, though as yet a theory in many
ways, has in it all the possibilities of a finer
world than mankind has ever known.
We believe in our cause freely; we will fight
for it; we feel that it is good for us and will
ultimately be good for our enemy.
Truly we are attending a world commence-·
ment, led by the democracies. It is our duty,
in the light of Science and Christianity, to work
out the new moral codes of our age; embody
them in social life and institutions; crystallize
them into laws and constitutions; develop them
in personal character, customs and ideals; and
thus provide mankind with a new frame of
social thinking adequate for the broader needs
of tomorrow.
But we cannot wait until tomorrow. Destiny
is crowding us so fast that we must be hard at
selecting our course now. Every weakness in
our plan, every delay in our action makes the
future struggle many times worse than it need
be. The waste and wanton destruction of this
war has surely brought home to us the in­efficacy
of not facing life as it is and preparing
ourselves in time. Truly tomorrow must always
begin today.
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ON" called Mrs. Mackay, "Don!" With
a little shrug, the boy put down his
.--..c.iI1 fretsaw. "Yes, mother" he answered
from the basement workroom where he had
been shaping out a pair of bookends, made
with a graceful design of maple leaves. He
went upstairs to the kitchen, which was warm
and full of the smell of freshly-baked short­bread.
Mrs. Mackay stood at the table, filling a box
with the fresh cookies. Her merry plump face
was flushed and wisps of grey hair had slipped
out of place as she worked. As Don came into
the kitchen she turned, with a worried ex­pression,
and asked, "Will you run over to Mrs.
Sutherland's with these cookies? She wants
them for the St. Andrew's Day Anckew's Day tea this after­noon."
"Sure" Don answered, filling his mouth
with a couple of broken bits of shortbread and
l~oing to the tap to wash his hands.
Mrs. Mackay looked at him as he stood
.aere, tall, freckled-face. blue eyes, sandy hair
with the two unruly cowlicks that would never
stay down with any amount of combing. He
had changed so much lately since he had
started to college. One never knew what he
was thinking any more.
"Don" she said, trying to sound quite
casual, "why don't you ask Mary Sutherland
.to that college dance? I'm sure she'd enjoy it."
He dried his hands without replying. "Is
this the box?" he asked.
"Yes" his mother replied. "You can tell
her I'll be down at the tea about half-past
four."
"O.K." He picked up the parcel and went
out. From the small cluttered backshed he
took his bike, trundled it down the steps, and
started off but without whistling as usual.
His mother thought he should ask Mary
Sutherland to the dance, because she was
Scotch, and the daughter of family friends.
Mary was nice, all right, but she didn't go to
28
college. Mum didn't quite understand. She
felt he should always move in the same little
circle of respectable, middle-class Scotch folk.
But, there was Olga.
Olga had come from Ukraine with her par­ents
when she was eight. She had wanted to
come to college and by dint of working as a
clerk, or waitress, in the holidays and doing
housework for her board, she had managed it.
You couldn't help but respect a girl like that.
Olga was fun, too; she took part in all their
Glass activities. They went to History Club to­gether
and had represented their year as a
debating team several times. Olga was clever,
but her family on the farm never seemed to
understand or sympathize with her ambitions.
For them Ukraine was the homeland still, and
the farm-work was their one interest. Canada
did not really claim their allegiance.
Yet suddenly Don began to wonder whether
his family, who had been in this country for
three generations, were much better. Scotch
songs, Scotch poetry,-all these things were
more important than anything Canadian in his
mother's eyes. A line ot"poetry he had often
heard her quote flashed into his mind-
"And they in dreams behold the Hebrides."
That was it,-not Canada but the "dim shieling
and the misty islands" of Scotland were his
people's country. He had often heard the
question of how Canada lacked national spirit
discussed. Perhaps this was part of the answer.
He had reached Sutherland's house now,
and went to the door with the parcel. Mary
met him and asked him in, but he refused, on
the grounds that he had work to do.
"Nothing but study for you college people!"
teased the girl.
"Could be worse things!" grinned Don. As
he started home he realized again that these
old associations meant less to him now than
the new ones he was making with all sorts of
people at college.
At home again, his mother met him. "Did
you deliver them safely?"
"Yes" he answered. Then realizing what
she wanted to know, he. said suddenly "I'm
going to take Olga Lazecho to the dance,
mother."
"Why, Don!" exclaimed Mrs. Mackay. "I
don't know her, do I? She's a foreigner, 1 sup­pose."
"No, she's Canadian, just as much, maybe
more than you or I. She's a grand kid, too. We
can't go on in little narrow circles of acquaint­anceship,
mum. There's a whole country full
of people to learn to know here."
Mrs. Mackay was silent, as Don went
downstairs and began thoughtfully to carve out
another graceful maple leaf on the bookends.
EDITORIAL
(Continued from Page 2)
The first counter attack on my contention
will come from the financial genii. They will'
wail in well-organized chorus-"We have no
large hall for our production. We must pay
for that accommodation and the only way we
can pay for it is to invite Mr. and Mrs. Winni­peg."
Granted. But even if it is necessary to in­vite
Mr. and Mrs. Winnipeg to pay for the
large hall, is it necessary to presume that they
are high class morons?
HERE we have a golden opportunity. There
is no professional stage in Winnipeg. A
few attempts have been made and very worthy
ones too. But even if our dramatic production
only runs for three days, why cannot we try to
present a play, instead of second-rate parade of
students in some bit of theatrical chicanery
which is just as unfair and unflattering to the
audience as it is to those taking part?
A student society, especially such an im­portant
one as the Dramatic Society, should
in its major production have the courage to
be a testing ground or a channel of direct com- ,
munication with Shaw or Sheridan or Shakes-.
peare.
If our University were situated in a college
town, instead of a metropolitan centre, we
would not have this tempetation to blame out­side
factors-financial reasons, or the tastes of
that vague group, the "general public" for our
ownlaxness in not realizing that the fine effort
put into this particular activity is being wasted.
We haven't the courage to attempt anything
beyond the somewhat banal drivel of a Broad-
29
way commercial success of hoary vintage.
After all, we are not supposed to be run­ning
our extra curricular activities for big
business reasons. Weare running them for
that "living" which we all worship so fervently
and abuse so dreadfully. The ideal state of
affairs would be to be able to run them without
outside support. The most practical compro­mise
in our situation would be to depend as
little as possible on outside support, retrench­ing
if necessary financially, and splurging in
ingenuity.
We, as students, are so fond of reforming
the world in general. Could we not also form
over a period of years an appreciative aud­ience
for drama in this not altogether Philis­tine
city of ours, thereby combining creative
energy with (dare 1 say it?) cultural enjoy­ment?
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( A Question, and an Answer? ' /( Question, and an Answer?
Why do 1 dare to dream
Of a tomorrow?
How can 1 think of happiness
And laughter when all th~
World is broken and will
Be spent and worn, when
My tomorrow comes?
How can 1 think of days of
Sunlight, warm and clinging,
Of water lapping on long shores?
Why do 1 remember rain
And violets beneath damp leaves . . .
The scent of roses, and the distant
Sound of bells hesitating in the winds?
Why do 1 think of poplars rustling,
And the clear, cool greenness of a
Valley path? Why do 1 dare to
Think of Beauty . . . or that
Tomorrow will be free?
Perhaps because 1 hope . . . as ages hoped
That when tomorrow dawns
The world will know itself in all
Its Beauty ... and all strife will
Cease.
Perhaps 1 dream of happiness,
And all the lovely things 1 have known,
Because 1 feel that somehow, by my dreaming,
The world will come to sanity again,
And know the dreams that have been
Clung to ... know the laughter
And the memories of things which
Made a world for some of us
Through long dark nights when the stars
Were very dim.
Perhaps those are the reasons for my dreaming ...
For a tomorrow will be sure to dawn.
-DONNA McRAE.
Today
There is a ceaseless murmuring and
Tears fall silently . . .
Dreams die in the darkness,
Quivering down like snow-stars
Through a winter hush, to be forgotten, crushed
And broken, underneath relentless marching feet.
Sighs tremble out across the silence
And the world is changed ...
Life and security have dropped from knowing,
All the warm small things have been
Torn away . . . and with so many others, my dream died.
The sigh of its passing echoed
Lonesomely around the spaces
Where once laughter clung ... 1 hear only.
Murmuring and the sigh of summer rain.
30
1 hear only water lapping lonely on
A barren shore. Wood plots are shorn of
F'eacefulness, of their brooding quiet, which
Is born of quiet and contentment.
There is an emptiness where friendship was ...
1 hear instead of bird cries, or the
Whirr of wings . . . instead of singing or
Music pulsing . . . 1 hear a distant
C1'ying and so many last farewells . . .
1 see a world in tears.
Is what 1 hear, this muffled throbbing,
Is it guns, or armies marching,
Children lonely, homeless, crying . . .
Or is it just the sobbing of my heart?
-DONNA McRAE.
By Enid Vivian Nemy
Mischa Elman
UTWAS Tuesday afternoon, March 11th, n at exactly three o'clock, 'and I was
... practically trembling from head to foot.
The idea of meeting Mischa Elman was thrill­ing
enough, but interviewing him-every time
I thought of it I became more and more fright­ened.
What if I should run out of questions and
topics of conversation and just sit and stare
dumbly, What if I asked a question that would
be considered too personal and be frozen with
an icy glance. Thus you more or less have an
idea of the state I was in when I walked into
the Royal Alex. that eventful day.
The clerk informed me that Mr. Elman was
at a writing table at the back of the rotunda.
I approached, softly and timidly. Mr. Elman
appeared to be absorbed in his letter, but he
soon looked up, and noticing me, asked if I was
the reporter from the University. Receiving an
affirmative answer he got up, shook hands and
led me to a comfortable armchair. The inter­view
had begun.
This was Mr. Elman's fifth concert in Win­nipeg.
His debut here was made on May 5th,
1911, in Central Church-just thirty years ago
-and he finds that audiences here are extreme­ly
appreciative, although they may not show
their enthusiasm in the same way as their emo­tional
South American neighbors. From Win­nipeg
he will travel to Edmonton, Calgary,
Vancouver and Victoria.
Summer months are supposed to be leisure
months, but they usually aren't. Open-air con~
certs in the Hollywood B9WI, and Los Angeles,
takes up considerable time, but Mr. Elman
says that he enjoys these summer concerts be­cause
people who otherwise couldn't afford to
attend are able to hear worth-while music.
31
For some years now the Elmans have made
New York their home. They have two children,
a daughter of fifteen and a son going on sixteen.
Neither of them are particularly interested in
music, but both take lessons, one piano and the
other violin. Occasionally when summer tours
are made, Mrs. Elman and the children accom­pany
him to South America, South Africa and
Europe.
Unlike Mrs. Brailowsky, the noted pianist's
wife, Mrs. Elman does not travel with her hus­band
on all long tours. Mr. Elman stated quite
frankly that he prefers having Mrs. Elman in
New York with the children, so that if any
emergency arose, his wife would be on hand.
As for jazz and all forms of popular music,
Mr. Elman says he just accepts them now as a
matter of course, and doesn't consider them
good or bad. He also doesn't play any favorites
in the classics. He doesn't care for one com­poser
or composition much more than another
and in choosing a programme Mr. Elman as­serted
that he knows what is better and plays
only that.
Then I mentioned that every student whose
parents came from Russia maintained, that
years and years ago, their mother or father
played with Mischa Elman. At this Mr. Elman
smiled and declared that so many people read
about him that they gradually come to believe
they actually know him. He added that similar
incidents are related to him in every city he
visits.
I forgot to mention that I was absolutely
determined to get Mr. Elman's autograph. How­ever,
you guessed it-I didn't. Somehow or
other my courage(?) failed me. Anyway, I was
afraid it would be considered rather juvenile
so I walked away with my head held high but
no signature.
Alumni Notes AluDlUiNotes
The large picture of the Wesley
College graduates in Arts of 1910 has
been missing from the walls of Con­vocation
Hall for some months.. It
contains among others the photo­graphs
of such prominent Winnipeg­gers
as C. V. Combe, W. R Cot­tingham,
Miss Salome Haldorson,
Harvey E. Kennedy, Dr. W. L. Mann,
and Dr. B. H. Olson. The blank
space on the wall is still awaiting its
return.
It was at the home of Dr. Salem G.
Bland in Toronto, that Marjorie C.
Elliott, '33. on March 29, became the
bride of Donald Robert Carr. The
ceremony was performed by Dr.
Bland, who from 1903 to 1917 was a
professor on the staff of Wesley Col­lege
and a colleague of the bride's
father. the late Dr. Jas. Elliott. Mr.
and Mrs. Carr will reside in Parry
Sound, Onto Mr. Carr works in the
D. I. L. explosives plant at Nobel.
Harry E. Duckworth, '35, on leave
of absence from the Physics Depart­ment
of the college, returned from
Chicazo for a few days during the
last of March. Mr. Duckworth has
been awarded a Universitv Fellow­ship
at the University of Chicago for
the year 1941-42, where he is study­ing
for his Ph.D. degree in Physics.
W. Frank Baker, '23, manager of
the God's Lake Gold Mines, and Mrs.
Baker (Estelle Mooney, '23). were
visitors in Winnipeg during the last
week in March.
The first Baffinlandian, of which
we have any record, to be born to
United College graduates, is Leslie
Gail Bildfell. He celebrated his
birthday at Pangnirtung, Baffin
Land, N.W.T., on April 4, where his
father, Dr. John A. Bildfell, '26, is in
charge of the mission hospital as
well as justice of the peace, coroner,
and health survey official for the
government. Leslie Gail's mother
was formerly Muriel Meech, '26.
Several issues ago we made an ap­peal
for news about graduates serv­ing
in His Majesty's forces. The re­sponse
has been slow in corning and
the following is therefore far from a
complete list. News of other grad­uates
or undergraduates is still
sought and may be forwarded to A.
D. Longman or A. S. Cummings.
Thomas G. Cottier, '35, is now a
pilot officer with the RC.A.F. and
was recently in Vancouver. Mter
graduation, Tom left Winnipeg for
the Isle of Man. He subsequently
spent two years at the University of
Leeds.
William G. Dodd, of the '38 class,
who recently qualified "with distinc­tion"
for the rank of pilot officer,
called at the College on March 22,
while en route from Saskatoon to
Trenton, where he will take two
months' further .training as an in­structor.
George Thurston, '3~, who enlisted
in the RC.A.F. last fall, recently
spent a few days leave in Winni­pee'.
He was at the Toronto manning
pool most of the winter. was later
transferred to Portave la Prairie and
expects to be posted shortly to the
Head of the Lakes.
William S. Patterson, '38, princi­pal
of the Carman Collegiate, has
recently joined the RC.AF. The
vacancy on the staff is bein-t filled
by Peter S. Buhr, '23, formerly prin­cipal
of the Birtle High SchooL
William A. McKay, '35, RC.A.F.,
who has been stationed at Prince
Albert, also spent a brief leave in
Winnipeg looking up old friends.
Capt. E. Douglas Rathbone, M.D.,
is with the Field Ambulance,
R.C.A.M.C.
Archie G.Greenway, '33, RC.A.F.
Rev. Robert M. Frayne, '24,
RC.AF., chaplain with rank of flight
lieutenant.
Robert Moyse, '40, with Royal
Canadian Navy.
Thomas Shortreed, '40, Gunnery
Section, RC.A.F.
John W. McInnis, '35, Canadian
Army.
Roy M. MacLaren, '35, Canadian
Army.
Gordon M. Steele, '35, RC.A.F.
Desmond O'Brien, '35, R.C.A.F.
Dwight N. Ridd, '20, Canadian
Army.
Capt. Gordon M. Churchill, '21,
Canadian Army.
Albert Mills, '21, RC.A.F.
James MacKelvie, '36, R.C.A.F.
Rev. Earl S. Dixon, '22, Army
chaplain. •
32
Rev. Hugh McFarlane, B.D., RC.
AF., chaplain.
The following undergraduates are
among those in service:
Cameron Mann, '39-'40, radio tech­nician,
RC.A.F.
Campbell A. McKinnon, grade 12,
'40, RC.A.F.
James G. Dyke, in Royal Canadian
Navy.
Murray Dempsey, grade 12, '40,
radio technician, RC.A.F.
Roderick McLennan, grade 12, '41,
RC.A.F.
William Bandeen, '34-'35, RC.A.F.
James Norman Lewis, '4$-'41,
RC.A.F.
John Tucker, '40-'41, RC.A.F.
W. Carleton Ross, '31-'32, R.C.A.F.
Harley Ransom, '26-'27, air mec-hanic,
RC.A.F.
Phillip Dicks Iverson, flying offi­cer,
RC.A.F.
Wilson Marshal Iverson, '31-'32,
RC.A.F.
George Sangster, '31-'32, RC.A.F.
William Sangster, '32-'33, R.C.A.F.
Samuel A. Blakeley, grade 12, '35,
Canadian Army.
Harold Tynte Ross, '39-'40, Cana­dian
Army.
Edward G. Jarjour, '39-'40, dental
corps.
Robert Sales, '33-'34, Canadian
Army.
John Sales, '34-'35, RC.A.F.
A number of United College grad­uates
have been nominated or an­nounced
their intention of accepting
nomination as candidates in the ap­proaching
Manitoba provincial elec­tion.
These include the only woman
member of the last Legislature,Sa­lome
Haldorson, '10 (Social Credit,
St. Georges), the first lady stick of
Wesley College; J. S. Lamond, K.C.,
'Toba, '10 (Lib.-Prog.), renominated
for Iberville; Rev. S. H. Knowles,
'33 (C.C.F.), for Winnipeg; Hon. J.
O. McLenaghen, 'Toba, '14 (minis­ter
6f health and public welfare), for
Selkirk; Mrs. Asta Oddson (Asta
Austmann), Wesley, '17 (Social Cre­dit),
for Winnipeg; Dr. H. O. Mc­Diarmid,
'Toba, '02, Brandon (Lib.­Prog.),
for Brandon. .
Elizabeth F. Morrison, '36, was
called to the Manitoba bar on March
10, 1941. u II
Rev. Richard Ashchoft, a graduate
in theology of Manitoba College of
1909, died in Winnipeg on March 10.
Mr. Ashcroft practised law in Scot­land
before he came to Canada in
1903.
FOR [OmPLETE EnjOymEnT
EnERGIZinG
SATI5FYInG
AnD
DELICIOUS
•
Our College
Is United
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